VR or Triple Monitors for Sim Racing?

Featured image: a triple monitor sim racing rig, courtesy of Patrick Kroppe

One of the most interesting and everlasting discussions on sim racing forums is, “which is better – VR or triple monitors?” I’ve spent a considerable amount of time using both, and it’s a very subjective thing that’s definitely worth writing about. The TL;DR is that you can do whatever feels right for you. But, both options have pros and cons. So, today we’re going to look at what those pros and cons are, in an effort to help you make a decision.

At the moment I have both on my rig, with three LG 32-inch panels and a Pimax Dream Air. Which one I race on depends on the day – some days I just want to jump in and out of a session on the triples, and other days I feel like getting more deeply involved in VR. I’ve been round the houses a bit since 2020, going from 27-inch triples to VR and a Samsung G9, and now back to triples again.

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My setup today | Racing in VR – the pros | Racing in VR – the cons | Racing on triples – the pros | Racing on triples – the cons | What about an ultrawide? | Is VR faster than triples? | What I’d tell a mate today

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My setup today

The triples are three LG UltraGear 32GP850-B monitors, which I run at 120 Hz with my eyes about 90 cm from the centre screen. Running three 1440p screens is about as much as I’d ask of my RTX 4090, and even then I see around 90 fps at the very most. I moved back to triples mostly because I was genuinely quite curious to see whether they’d give me that extra bit of immersion.

For VR, the main sim runs a Dream Air Lighthouse with two Base Station 2.0s sat on the shelves above the rig, angled to peer down into the cockpit so the monitors can’t block the tracking (how I set mine up). On my testing setup I use the Dream Air SLAM instead, because it’s so much easier to set up. SLAM means the Dream Air tracks itself with its own cameras, so there are no base stations at all.

Racing in VR – the pros

I’m a huge advocate of VR headsets. In VR, you are fully immersed in the race. The depth of the VR environment is what makes it so special. Look right or left and you’ll see cars alongside you.

As I’ve written before, racing in VR encourages you to improve your basic racing discipline. The way you look into a corner, spot the apex as you trail brake, sight the exit and settle the car on the throttle feels like a much more natural experience. You’ll see photos of real drivers preparing for a corner with their heads already turned into it, and VR makes you do this far more than a monitor can. You also get an earlier warning of the car beginning to rotate. It’s not magic, you’re just getting the information earlier as your eyes sense your entire environment rotating.

I race iRacing on the Dream Air now, and to me its OLED screens are stunning. It’s a bit GPU intensive, but it’s a lot lighter and more comfortable than the Crystal series. I very much appreciate its slimmer cables, which are far less distracting. Set up correctly, it’s so much easier to judge corner entry and use your vision for the exit. That’s where VR beats monitors for me, because your mind is able to process a sort of spatial awareness that monitors simply don’t deliver. VR also gets your FOV (field of view) right without any calculation, from the moment you put the headset on.

Pimax discount codes: use SIMRACINGCOCKPIT for 2% off, or SIMRACINGCOCKPIT25 for $25 off, at pimax.com.

Racing in VR – the cons

VR makes you sweat, and naturally, as you get hotter the experience becomes uncomfortable. I’d be the first to admit I break into a sweat at the slightest opportunity, and after many hours of use the padding on my Valve Index really needed a clean. I ended up putting two fans either side of the pedals pointing towards me, which keeps me from having a major sweat breakout!

Tracking can be unreliable. Every headset I’ve ever used has presented a problem at some stage, usually right before a race! If you’re lucky you can reboot and jump in before everyone grids up, but sometimes a problem will cost you the race and, inevitably, iRating.

Big, thick cables never really disappear and can be a distraction. They can also be damaged and need replacing, which is exactly what happened to my Index. Not being able to see your controls is a really frustrating feature of VR. I use the buttons on my GT wheel by feel, and I’d love to make switches and add a dash, but there’s absolutely no point.

VR asks a lot of your PC, and as with all things VR, the CPU spec is as important as the GPU spec. Even my 12th-gen i9 seemed to struggle a little with an RTX 4090, which I felt was very slight bottlenecking at very high settings (what to look for in a sim racing PC). Long stints are harder going with the weight on your face, and you have to take the headset off every time you need your phone, the keyboard or a word with someone in the room.

Racing on triples – the pros

Triples deal with every possible downside of VR. You get less hot, they’re arguably easier to use once configured, and you can use your sim racing PC for other stuff too. A good triple monitor setup also gives you scope for a much more creative rig build, where you can put together a very authentic-looking cockpit with a proper DDU and dashboard. VR renders a lot of this useless, which does take the fun out of finalising the details of your simulator.

With no headset to put on and adjust first, the triples are what I reach for when I fancy a quick race. Sim racers are split on peripheral awareness, though. Triples show you a car alongside without moving your head, while in VR you turn and look to the side to find it.

If you’re building a set of 32-inch triples, the table below is a good place to start.

Racing on triples – the cons

I really hate managing cables. For some reason, I’ve never been happy with my cable tidiness, and triples mean three power cables and three DisplayPort cables. My LGs make it worse, because the power supplies are separate. So instead of three power cables it’s three mains cables, three PSUs and then three of the little low-voltage leads that run the monitors themselves.

Getting the alignment right on the monitor stand is also problematic at first. Sim-Lab’s Vario mounts go some way to solving this, giving you fine adjustments to line the screens up properly. Then there’s bezel correction, which is telling the sim how wide the gaps between the screens are, so the picture lines up across them. Learning how to calculate your FOV correctly takes time too, and if you get it wrong it can drastically reduce your enjoyment in the simulator (our FOV calculator and triples setup guide for iRacing will help).

When you’re testing things like I do, you can sometimes lose your best config settings for iRacing, which is obviously quite frustrating. Back in 2020, NVIDIA Surround on my 2080 Ti would frequently give me a black screen that I couldn’t recover from without rebooting into safe mode and uninstalling the driver. And finally, you don’t get the level of immersion from triple monitors that you do from VR.

Sim-Lab discount code: use SIMRACINGCOCKPIT for 5% off at sim-lab.eu.

What about an ultrawide?

In December 2020 I swapped my 27-inch triples for a single 49-inch Samsung G9. To be honest, I’d always found the extra cables and messing around with bezel alignment painful, and if you’re time poor like I am, you always find yourself messing around with settings for longer than actual racing. With the FOV set at around 90 degrees the G9 was perfect, and it was actually a welcome break from VR too (my G9 review).

The G9 has been my office PC screen for years now, and five years on it occasionally flickers, then returns to normal. For me, ultrawide versus triples boils down to simplicity versus immersion. If you just want to mount it, plug in a power cable and a display cable, set your FOV and race, an ultrawide is the easier way to go (our gaming monitors guide has the current options).

Is VR faster than triples?

A few months after buying my Valve Index in April 2020, I wrote that I was faster with VR, and that it had been one of the biggest contributors to improving my driving technique in the sim. That early warning of what the car is doing makes it easier to control, so you end up driving more consistently.

Daniel Morad, a professional GT3 driver, started sim racing in VR and moved to triples, and in his view the lap times end up pretty similar once you’ve had the practice. Suellio Almeida, a real racing driver and coach, puts VR ahead for a beginner and on a par with monitors for an intermediate driver. At the very top of esports, he reckons monitors give a real edge.

What I’d tell a mate today

In 2022 I wrote that the best point of entry to sim racing was a classic rig with triples, with VR as an optional extra if you could afford it. I also said that either option has its limitations, but I’d always gravitate towards monitors if I had to choose between the two.

Four years on, there’s a Dream Air on the rig next to the triples. If you’re new and want to try VR without spending big, a Quest 3 (mine’s a refurbished one) or the Quest 3S will stream to your PC over a cable or Wi-Fi, with some compression in the picture. The Dream Air SE is a different kind of entry point. It’s much less power hungry, and if your PC doesn’t have the latest high-end RTX card, it sits in that comfortable middle ground between sticking with a Quest 3 and going all the way to the top-end headsets (my Dream Air SE review).

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Our VR headsets guide goes through the current headsets for sim racing, and the gaming monitors guide does the same for triples and ultrawides. Good luck and let me know how you get on in the comments!

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