Fans of “the real driving simulator,” AKA Gran Turismo, gasp! For there’s a new official GT racing steering wheel coming your way. Like the previous official GT racing wheel, this one here, called T-GT, is born out of a close collaboration between specialist game peripheral maker Thrustmaster and the creators of Gran Turismo to ensure seamless integration and extreme realism, and it took the team a good four years to developed. For freaking years. That is a long time to develop a peripheral and so we trust that it must be beyond good. If delivered as promised, the upcoming Thrustmaster T-GT Racing Steering Wheel could be the most advanced game steering wheel ever.
It touts a custom brushless motor, T-40VE, that provides 40W of accurate linear force feedback torque while technologies like the T-Lin offers force feedback linearity, ensuring the force feedback felt by the user is 100% proportional to the force determined in the game. And then there’s the crown jewel of force feedback steering wheels: the Depth Force Feedback, or T-DFB, that offers 3D perception of the environment, letting you feel the range of real car effects like tire adherence in understeering and oversteering, mass transfers, road textures and irregularities, suspension and vibrations, and more – specific to each vehicle and circuit.
The added sensations, output through the steering column, conveys detail information in the range of 30 Hz to 100 Hz which a standard force feedback is unable to replicate. However, this holy grail of force feedback is something of an exclusivity as it can only be fully experienced in Gran Turismo Sport, the latest Gran Turismo title hitting the store in coming months. The wheel will come wrapped in genuine leather, features two customizable mini-sticks and four rotary selector dials which afford direct control of four key settings: brake balancing, control of anti-skid systems, torque distribution allocation, and fuel injection mapping. All told, Thrustmaster T-GT offers up to 25 possible action buttons – an amount never before available on PS4.
Thrustmaster x Gran Turismo T-GT Racing Steering Wheel comprises of the T-GT servo base, a detachable T-GT wheel, a custom 400W T-Turbo toroidal-shaped power supply, as well as a three-pedal T3PGT pedal set. The latter boasts an improved weight balance base, metal pedals paired to metal arms with long range of travel, brake pedal with progressive resistance, and adjustable height and spacing for the accelerator and clutch pedals. It looks like it does not come with a stick shift though, and therefore, if manual is your poison, then you will have acquire one (such as the TH8A Add-on Shifter) separately. Not sure if an official shifter will be available down the road.
The Thrustmaster x Gran Turismo T-GT Racing Steering Wheel will be available sometime this Fall along with the launch of the much anticipated Gran Turismo Sport video game (which as originally scheduled for November 2016 availability) with a hefty $799.99. And that’s without the shifter, which will add a further $160 to the bill. In the mean time, you can tie over your need for (realistic) speed with the official Gran Turismo Sport video below.
Images: Thrustmaster.
Thrustmaster via DriveTribe.
