If you have found yourself searching for the best force feedback settings for your direct drive wheelbase in Le Mans Ultimate, you have (probably) come to the best place.
Our testers have put in many hours refining, changing, refining more, changing more and cross checking these FFB settings together on a number of different DD bases with strengths varying from 9NM all the way to 25NM.
The FFB settings we have settled on were tested in a number of different cars on a number of different tracks in Le Mans Ultimate. Our aim is not to provide you with car specific settings, but a refined FFB setup that will act as a strong base to work from for every single car Le Mans Utlimate offers.
You will also be pleased to know our settings were passed on to David Perel – real Le Mans GTE driver for the Spirit of Race racing team – for a final test and he gave them his seal of approval. So you know they must be good.
General Feedback Settings
Let’s begin with ensuring the Force Feedback Effects are switched on. This basic setting is a must if you want FFB in Le Mans Ultimate.
Currently, we have found that you need to switch on Invert Force Feedback with some wheelbases to give an accurate output. You may experience your wheel pulling left, right or both without this switched on. But it is subjective to your wheel base so test this out for yourself. If your feedback feels all weird, it could be this isn’t on.
The two biggest factors in your general FFB settings are next, with your steering torque capability and force feedback strength. We found these made major differences in general feel, weight of the wheel, clipping, small vibrations and more.
The Steering Torque Capability has a huge effect on the feeling of every single car. If you have tried Le Mans Ultimate’s default settings, you may have noticed horrible wheel vibrations whilst going straight, but turning this setting up negates that feeling and makes your DD base so much smoother.
You will need to change the steering torque capability so it matches your wheelbase somewhat, although there are a few exceptions. Generally speaking if you have a 10NM DD base, you can set this to 10NM, if you have a 20NM base, you can set this to 20NM etc, so you get a like for like.
- What we actually found is the further away you set this from your direct drive bases max NM, the weaker the signals got in your base, but there definitely is some leeway also. Force feedback is so subjective, what we like may not be something you like and what you like can be totally different to the next person.
We implore you to experiment with this until you are happy with the feelings you are getting from the base. But just remember matching the steering torque to your base gives you the most accurate response of the cars real forces.
With the Force Feedback Strength we settled on 100% which is default, this gives a nice weighted feel in all cars when tested on a 9NM and 10NM base. If your base is under 10NM you may experience some clipping, so you can lower this to around 90% and it should solve that issue. You’ll want to set your wheel driver to go as strong as the wheel supports, and with what you’re comfortable with, then lower the in game FFB strength until it’s to your liking for the most optimal experience.
Anything over 18NM and it won’t be clipping you experience at 100%, but you may think the strength is too much, so you could go as low as 60%, especially on a DD base above 20NM. Strength is always very subjective however. Likewise you could also increase the strength to 110% to bring even more weight into the wheel.
Some people love to feel every little bump on track. Some people like it a little smoother. This is where your Force Feedback Smoothing comes into play. We settled on 0 smoothness.
Some wheels don’t deal well with the noisy nature of strong FFB signals and some of you won’t like the harsh sudden hits in FFB that you can experience when riding curbs or hitting bumps. The FFB smoothing will iron some of those out for you. The higher the number from 0, the more samples of FFB will be considered for smoothing. This will keep the constant force the same but flatten some details.
Like we said, we settled on 0 based on all our other settings and because it gives you the full load of low latency details and good wheelbases will deal with this fine. But again, you can experiment with testing this, but we feel anything over 3 loses far too much detail.
The Minimum Steering Torque will pop up and tell you not to use it with direct drive bases, so leave it at 0%. Although in our testing we didn’t actually feel any difference on 0%, 1% or 2%. If you have a really low NM direct drive (5NM and below) you may benefit from this a little. But definitely if you have a DD above 8-10NM leave it at 0.
Advanced Feedback Settings
You have collision strength and steering torque sensitivity to adjust in advanced settings and this is what we recommend you use.
We lowered the Collision Strength to 100% because who wants their steering wheel to be ripped out of their hands when someone crashes into them? No one. Lowering this to 100% from 150% also stops clipping with those high impact forces. A simple one, but one that will save your wrists.
The Steering Torque Sensitivity settings have now been fixed. On early builds their was a pop up that said not to use with direct drive bases. This was wrong and LMU fixed it, so thats great. You need this set to 100% to ensure all of your force feedback settings are working correctly to get the best experience possible. This is absolutely key to your direct drive experience in Le Mans Ultimate. If you have a DD base under 8NM you could experiment increasing this further to give you more strength at lower levels but otherwise leave at 100%.
Things To Adjust Per Class
We mentioned earlier that certain settings may need adjustments depending on what class of car you are racing and what DD base you have, to bring you a more refined experience on track.
So let’s start with the LMP2 which uses only one car in its class, thus making it the easiest to refine. We found the LMP2 will give you the most raw feeling through the wheel out of the box, because of this it can seem a tad voilent on the hands at times. With DD bases on the lower NM scale you may want to drop the FFB strength from 100% to 90% to stop clipping as much as possible whilst retaining as much information through your wheel. This will make it feel smoother on track.
GTE’s are well balanced and our settings provide a great equilibrium between detail and strength in all four cars available. You can really feel the weight of these cars in your hands and we actually wouldn’t change much.
Hypercars such as the Toyota or Cadillac need some of that overall strength put back into them that we took out of the LMP2. In general the hypercars feel the lightest on the steering in the slow stuff on all DD bases, but amazing in the high speed stuff. There are a few things you could change to bring them more to life at slow speed such as increasing the steering torque sensitivity from 100% to 105%.
Final Thoughts
We really hope you enjoy these force feedback settings as much as our testers have enjoyed making them. Lots of hours went into the building of these settings and remember, they even received the seal of approval from David Perel himself. They gave us great feedback in all cars and track combinations and it really makes each and every car feel alive.
