A while back I did a video of Project CARS running on the Surface Pro 2, and it ran, but only barely, on on the least detailed track in the game. I always felt like I could get the game to run better... just wasn't in the mood to install such a large program on my tablet again... until now. :)
My first video this time around was on California Highway, at 1080p with 6 cars on the track, and it ran pretty good!I recorded this video with my iPhone.
Still, I wasn't fully satisfied. The frame rate seemed a little low, and from outside the car, the framerate dropped significantly. As I was making the above video, I remembered that running the game in 720p when I had my 560Ti greatly improved the performance, so why wouldn't that work now? Sadly, on the Surface Pro 2, it's not as simple as just dropping the resolution in game. The Surface tablets put a black border around the game when you do that. I looked online for a bit, and the best solution I found was to set the desktop resolution to 720p, and then launch the game at 720p. It's a bit of annoyance, but if you wanna play Project CARS on your tablet, it's worth it. You can also install beta drivers for the Intel HD card directly from Intel, but I didn't want to bother with that. Below is my first video on the Surface Pro 2 at 720p, with rain and lightning, running great. This video was also recorded with my iPhone 5S.
After this, I got ambitious. I asked myself, what if I plugged my Logitech G27 into the Surface Pro 2, and ran a full grid of cars? Would it work? A rather impractical question, as the whole point of the Surface Pro 2 is being mobile, something the G27 is not... but I still had to know. Setting things up so that you could see my G27 setup, and the Surface Pro 2 screen together wasn't easy, but I did it! The picture quality is terrible, and if you want to see whats going on in the race, you pretty much have to view in full screen, but for demonstration purposes, this video works pretty well. There were 43 cars on the track during this video, and the Surface Pro 2 handled it fantastically. No input lag, no FPS spikes, just a smooth, clean drive.
I was sad the game didn't run well enough to use FRAPS to record it... but wait, maybe it does? For my final Surface Pro 2 video, I decided to try recording a race with FRAPS, just to see how well it worked. The framerate does drop with FRAPS, but it's still manageable. For this race, the grid is full of 38 cars. The AI was turned to 25%, and the player's AI car was placed in the back of the pack, to overtake as many as possible. Again, the game runs awesome!
This will be my last video on the Surface Pro 2 for promotion of the game running on this platform... at least until the official release of the game. You may see more Surface Pro 2 video's of Project CARS popping up here and there though, as I'm traveling. I'll be in Miami for a week during Christmas break, so one or two might pop up then as well.
Hope you enjoyed this article as much as I did making it! I bought my Surface Pro 2 used from Amazon, you can find a link to it on the left, as well as a link to the G27 which I also bought there.
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