How Assetto Corsa devs used Xbox One, PS4 limitations to their advantage

Bringing Assetto Corsa to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is an ambitious project, the game is a full-blown racing simulator that is deeply tied into the PC. Assetto Corsa officially released on Steam in 2014, after being available through Early Access for a year and since then it's community has kept growing.

The game is a demanding game, it requires quite a bit from your computer and the player, which makes it no surprise that the PC community doesn't believe that developer Kunos Simulazioni can bring the game to consoles.

 "Some people say that we're not able to bring the same depth to the console that we have on the PC, that it's just not possible," explained Kunos co-founder Marco Massarutto to ArsTechnica. "The majority of people, though, say that they can't wait to see Assetto Corsa on console because the consoles need a proper [car] simulation."

To a degree, the PC community was on to something when they said the game couldn't reach the same depth. While Kunos has managed to get the game running at 60fps, it was not an easy process.

"The first time we ran the PS4 version it ran at 15 frames per second, which was a bit shocking for us," said Massarutto. "We have a very good programmer, though, and we worked for a year to optimise everything and use every core of the PS4 and Xbox One in order to get the kind of performance we're seeing today.

"We're used to creating simulation software specifically for the PC, and we've been doing that since 2005. However, the PS4 and Xbox One are much closer to PC architecture than the previous consoles were… especially the PS3. Still, the hardware is pretty different…at the start we didn't believe we could achieve 60 frames per second, we thought we would have to stick at 30 frames."

The PS4 and Xbox One's architecture did make things easier for the developers and it wasn't only because they are similar to the PC. The limitations of the consoles actually helped the developers out quite a bit.

"On console you must fight with the limitations of a fixed hardware," explained Massarutto. "The good thing about fixed hardware is that you know exactly what you've got to work with in terms of resources. In the end, we did it, though."

When Assetto Corsa releases on the Xbox One and PS4 it will release with over 100 cars, over 20 tracks confugurations, single and multuplayer race modes, and more.

Check out the full interview here.