Racing fan builds incredible five-screen simulator at home

Chad Smith is what you would call a racing game aficionado. He represents a subset of gamers so devoted to their favorite genre, they'll go to great extremes to ensure the most realistic experience possible. To that end, Smith outfitted his home PC with five monitors, arranged them like the windows on a car, fired up his head-mounted camera, and posted a video of himself playing on the setup to YouTube.

In the video, Smith is playing a popular massively multiplayer online racing simulation called iRacing, on an authentic recreation of the real-life Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course track. His point of view is being pumped out across the five screens at a whopping total 9600x1080 resolution. According to Smith's comments on a second video, his graphics card — an AMD Radeon HD 6870 — is able to deliver the action at a fairly consistent 84 frames-per-second, ensuring an assuredly white-knuckle sense of speed.

To round out the setup, Smith is using the iRaceDash app for iOS on an iPhone he has mounted to his force-feedback steering wheel. The $4.99 app provides real-time data on his car's performance, including speed, fuel level, and tire condition. You can check out another very realistic video of his setup being used to play Richard Burns Rally on YouTube — just make sure you don't do it on a full stomach.

This article was written by Randy Nelson and originally appeared on Tecca

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