Thanks for all this info and testing! These are good numbers to see! However, I wanted to take a second to correct something I believe might be inaccurate in your understanding, specifically, a bit of a misunderstanding of what exactly it is that Anti-Aliasing is doing for the render. In short, it's not related to the shadows at all, which you mentioned and gestured to a few times when talking about it. In regards to games, it's almost exclusively going to be related to the edges of the objects themselves to help them appear smooth. Which is to say, this does not tie into the cast shadows or shadow maps. It COULD have a small effect on how they're perceived as the filter is applied, but in iRacings case, as I'll explain a little of below, the shadow resolution is low/bad enough that you're not going to really see much happening there, you'll primarily see it on the edges of objects on a very small, only a few pixels like 1-3, level whereas those shadows are extending across 20px-100px depending on resolution. In my case for example, if my AA is below 4x, I can see the edges of curbs where they connect to the road in particular as well as handrails etc. show kind of a "shimmer" as I move along the track. This happens because the edges get kind of a stair step effect with out AA, especially on lower resolution. So though it's expensive, I pay the cost because I hate that shimmer. The value of AA is also resolution dependent, so for higher res screens it might be much less necessary than lower res screens. Additionally, when changing between FXAA and SMAA, if you already have AA off, I'm not entirely sure that there will be any effect, specifically because AA is already off, so there's no processes happening in either case. Can't remember if you had AA on or at 2/4/etc or not when messing with that setting. A more thorough explanation can be found here - kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nM6eoNplnK6Uink.html In regards to the Jaggies on shadows in iRacing, I'm not entirely sure the specifics here, but I believe this is a short coming of their engine and the rendering tech. A great example you can probably see, if you take a flat colored car into the paint room, and just start moving around, you'll essentially see stripes across surfaces. This gets a bit into tech I'm not entirely familiar with, but what I believe is happening there is essentially the lighting having an iteration over distance, which is would KIND of work like a resolution in its own way. In some cases, you can see this type of visual can be found due to low resolution shadow maps, however, shadow maps are not used on dynamic shadows as we'd see on the cars and such. To say a little about that, cast shadows are still pretty expensive when it comes to creating a render, but you can see how far we have come in more modern games when we have settings/tech that allow an objects shadow to blur the farther away it gets from its source, vs iRacing's striped artifacts. jagged edges and lightly blury edges, causeit's a much older title, obviously. But, all that to say, I believe that's an artifact of iRacing's lighting specifically, but at the very least, it is not tied to AA when it comes to shadows. Hope all that's of some value, thanks again for taking the time to put all this together for folks!

Quality work, appreciate how much work has gone into this. Very timely too, suffered from the issue you mentioned, my i913 getting a lot more than 'toasty' with the MSI settings as supplied. PC kept crashing, updated the BIOS with the latest MSI download and now have performance issues in game. 4080 Aero VR. So big thanks for this, will work through the suggestions and look forward to Pt2. Cheers.

Insane amount of work behind this, thank you very much for putting this together!

He actually has video’s from years ago on this exact topic, the amount of expertise and dedication. My gosh you truely are one of the most useful content creators I’ve come across! Thank you.

Fantastic video. Thank you for taking the time.

Wizard! I also had been struggling with the stutters and I too have a high end system. Amazing work!!!

I put the MMSA samples to zero for sports track racing and it was horrible, the lines on the side of the road become pixelated and triangled and it appeared to be rendering as I drove, causing the corners to be unclear. It was hard to judge the corners and apexes. I changed them back to x4 quick smart. It may not affect oval racing as much, as you do not need to concentrate on braking for corners. Also be aware that if you change the compressing, iracing will reset you screen parameters, viewing distance and also your iracing graphics setting to default and you will have to put them in again, so it may be good to take note of what they are before you change it. Would have been good if you mentioned this in the vid, as it took a lot of troubleshooting for me to correct again. In the end, I just resorted to my original settings and was down about an hour of my time from messing around. I really should have just left it how it was in the first place with the setting from your last video a year ago, that video helped me more for mu situation. This video was not an improvement for my PC. The old saying, if its not broken, dont try and fix it. haha

You put a lot of work into this, but that is one massive misunderstanding of what MSAA does. MSAA is sub-pixel sampling that improves the jaggedness of high contrast transitions in the image, it has nothing to do with shadows. The reason performance changes two fold from 8x to 4x is because the GPU is by definition doing almost half the work in rendering the image. 8x is still not a reasonable setting to be on, but 4x or 2x are absolutely a good choice especially if you are on a 1080p or 1440p display. You might not have noticed any change going from 8x to 0x since you had SMAA enabled in the other anti-aliasing section.

Thank you for the video I'm going to try your settings on VR see if they help.

Just wondering how good the metrics are on the new road tracks. Also have you done some benchmarks for example on okayama with folliage on? I'm just curious because I think these settings may work okish for oval, but on street you will have great difficulty to have good FPS numbers.

Nice work...thanks

I will work on that tonight

Nice work!

Also what mic are you using, thanks...

new sub here, good job man!

Have you made any changes within the NVidia control panel since last time?

iRacing has it's own shadow resolution setting in the .ini file which could be why you don't see much change there when you mess with the AA settings. I do see a fairly noticeable difference in the turn 1 wall jaggedness when you go from a higher AA number to 0, although even with higher AA it's still pretty ugly. Guess it just depends on if you think that small improvement is worth it for the performance hit.

Would be good to see what impact these changes have on tracks like Spa with much more complex objects (foliage) to render.

MSAA actually works for VR, so this is where it would be beneficial.

I'm baffled that you know so much about graphics settings but your videos are all jittery despite being 60fps.

Graphics tab is when u are racing. I cant do a controlled benchmark in a race due to too many variables. Everything shown was tested in a race to confirm

Do you use LOD? On another note, I thought that anti aliasing only applied when coupled with FSR.

MSAA Off on my machine, the wall looked horrible...Back to 4X

Appreciate your effort but you are totally mistaken on the AA samples try with lower resolution settings and you see the major difference!

Pretty sure there is a shadow resolution setting in the Ini folder mate, it helps shadow jaggies.

I came from gt7 to I racing recently... and I got to say this graphics setting up is a nightmare. Tried rain masters 1st lap it just cut out . Is there any chance at the end of this series when you have all your veiws etc you could put still pictures of the setting we need to change? Because it will take a lifetime to scroll through your videos that I do appreciate thank you.

idont lower the graphics cos of the fps, more cos of the latency

I’m completely computer illiterate - these videos help a ton though and iRacing kinda forces you to learn it. Does it matter what gpu i have? I have a 3060 vs your 4090.. I don’t have many issues other than a little bit of stuttering but not bad at all.

your content and the way you present is always great!! I am intrigued by MSAA samples. when I put it to 0x, the game becomes horrible for road tracks... jagged lines, etc. muuuuuuuuch worse than 8x or 4x. FPS was way better with 0x for sure, but the image was completely different. Not sure why for you the images are identical... I have an i9 13900k, RTX 4070super, 32GB ram, triple 2k monitors.

So you got a powerful computer, got it.

Interesting stuff - strange that iRsidekick seems to very much disagree with the compressed textures "Since 2023 Q4 iRacing is using a lot of VRAM on new tracks, it is essential to compress all textures to avoid blurry graphics" Gonna give it a try anyway :)

Why do you change the " Replay" tab settings instead of the "Graphics" tab? I would think the "Graphics" tab is what changes the in-game graphics.

I think you need a contact frame for your cpu or your custom water loop is terrible, I could run 5.6ghz all core on p cores on my 13900k with a 360mm aio and temps in iracing wouldn’t go above 70° c on my 14900k it runs 5.7ghz all core and 4.4 on the e-cores and still temps are below 70°

Do a lot of these work the same for replay...as that is what I use for broadcasting...thanks..

I race in VR. My VR while racing will drop to lik99999999999. Will this work for that too! Getting sick of having to back out of ofiicials and killing mypffl

It's wired people have problems with iracing. Cause I have a average pc with no problems in my opinion. I run a i5-10400f cpu, with a ASRock Radeon 6600xt. And got the 49 inch odyssey g9 neo monitor and I run around 120fps to 160fps depending on the track and how many people. I do get only 90 to about 130 fps with rain. But I hate the rain and don't race it. I could if I needed to. Look it ain't 300fps but it works just fine for me on every game I've played iracing, LMU, Warzone, BeamNG, Apex, ATS, ect. Will be trying to uncompress the paint files though. Thanks for the info in these videos.

Dont agree at all mate.. MSAA at 0 looks like shit on railings , fences and tracklines.. And SSAO and SMAA are heavy on FPS on my 13900/4090 triple 1440p setup. MSAA 4x and SSAO/SMAA off is way better for me.

I have been having issues with iracing crashing in the middle of a race it just freezes and kicks me out I dunno what’s going on but it’s frustrating

MSAA has a very obvious effect. You need to look at model edges not shadow edges.

Hmmm. Seems that everything has no difference?

7 minutes in and he’s STILL telling a meandering repetitive irrelevant story like my grandad would.