What makes a “Good” Direct Drive wheelbase in 2026?
You’ve likely heard me say in our Direct Drive wheelbase reviews for a few years now that “everything is good now”, and “there isn’t really a wrong choice, so don’t overthink it”. But with so many brands now speaking about their exclusive approaches to “next gen force feedback”, how do we navigate the marketing and make the right choice, and does it actually make a tangible difference?
This article is designed to empower you with the knowledge required to cut through the marketing fluff and understand what’s actually going on. Sound good? OK, let’s dive in, starting with the most important questions, and then digging deeper into the jargon!
For comparisons between Direct Drive Wheelbases and details of each major brand’s ecosystem, make sure you check out The Essential Direct Drive Sim Racing Buyer’s Guide HERE.
How many Newton Meters (NM) of strength do you actually need in a wheelbase?
Ultimately all you need is enough dynamic range to produce the forces necessary to communicate what the car is doing under you in a manner which doesn’t require explosive muscle input and doesn’t result in clipping, or compressing weaker forces. You should always be driving the car, the car should never be driving you. For the vast majority of adults, the sweet spot falls between 10 and 14NM.
Even on the most high end bases, I end up capping the dynamic range at around 15NM because this is the maximum amount of force I ever want to feel under the most extreme scenario like being sent into the shadow realm by netcode in iRacing. A little bit of clipping under crash circumstances is absolutely fine, as long as you’re not clipping when hitting kerbs or generating sustained cornering loads, as this will instantly make the wheel feel numb and disconnected. Allowing for this, I genuinely believe nobody “needs” more than 20NM, and the vast majority of people will be absolutely fine with 15NM and never have a desire to upgrade for any reason other than FOMO.
What is Dynamic Range?
Dynamic range is quite simply just the range of force the wheelbase is able to produce between nothing and its maximum, just like how loud you can turn up a stereo system before it begins to clip or distort.
The more dynamic range you have, the wider range of strength levels you will be able to experience through the steering, so the more accurately it can reproduce the sensations you would actually feel through the steering wheel of a real car, from tiny details like road texture, through to kerbs, sustained cornering forces and impacts. But there is a range of usefulness before you get into the territory of diminishing return, and we’ll talk about that shortly.
What is clipping?
Clipping occurs when the input signal amplitude (gain, or “volume” in simplified terms) fed to the motor exceeds the device’s ability to process it. This can be compared to your sound system at home, and is like when you plug your phone in via an AUX cable and crank the volume on the phone all the way up. You’ll notice distortion can be created even though the volume of the amplifier is low.
On a wheelbase, clipping results in your force feedback essentially flatlining and losing all its fidelity for the duration of the clipping event, which in practice can literally make the car feel like it’s understeering mid corner (not good!). It can also very bad for the hardware if appropriate countermeasures aren’t in place to protect the internals.
What makes a good Direct Drive base?
OK time to get into the weeds a bit.
For more than 30 years now we’ve relied on a Microsoft protocol called DirectInput as the universal standard for feeding game (or sim) physics based effects through to your hands on PC. This is all now starting to change, with manufacturers introducing new telemetry based approaches to generating what you feel through the wheel, and there’s a lot you need to understand, but we’ll get into these new approaches a little later on.
Microsoft’s DirectInput API was never intended to handle high powered, direct drive wheelbases, and sim developers can’t account for every manufacturer’s idea of how the data should be handled. Even without the filters you see in the software, there is a heap of signal processing going on in the firmware, this is necessary to deal with things like oscillations caused by the delay in the feedback loop between when the game commands a torque signal and sees the measured position change. This “baked in” signal processing is why a simple firmware update can completely transform how a wheelbase feels even if you run the filters the same as you did before the update. So the whole idea that running no filters on your base allows you to “feel what the game developer intended” is fundamentally flawed.
My recommendation is to always start with minimal filtering to establish a baseline understanding of how your wheelbase performs, then begin introducing filters to find your subjective sweet spot, adjusting one thing at a time to establish an understranding of how each filter impacts the driving experience, and how the filters interact with each other to produce the overall driving feel.
Before we even discuss other buzzwords like “slew-rate” and “encoder resolution, all you really need to know is that a quality direct drive wheelbase will have an innate ability to produce smooth and accurate force feedback without the need to run so much filtering that you end up numbing the overall driving feel by needing to remove the detail conducive to feeling what the car is doing under you.
A quality direct drive wheelbase will have an innate ability to produce smooth and accurate force feedback, without the need to run so much filtering that you end up numbing the overall driving feel by needing to remove the detail conducive to feeling what the car is doing under you.
Some do it better than others, and this is probably the only remaining differentiator between a “good” and a “great” DD base if we’re just talking FFB without getting into things like telemetry FFB, proprietary APIs, LFE, etc. That’s why this tends to be the focus of our review content rather than getting bogged down in the technical details of measuring things like slew-rate, etc.
So what’s changing now with “Telemetry FFB”, and WTF is that?
DirectInput consists of a set of effects you can output through the wheel. Spring, Damper, constant force and compound effects. Most sim racing titles nowadays only use the constant force effect to generate all their FFB, as this allows the wheel to be pushed in either direction with a force percentage anywhere within the dynamic range of the motor, and can be updated as many as 1000 times per second. For those with an eye for detail, that’s why you often see manufacturers advertising a 1000Hz sample rate. Don’t tell anyone I told you, but the actual sample rate coming out of the game is usually lower than this in practice.
DirectInput also provides the feedback loop necessary for the sim to know the wheel’s current position so you can actually steer the car. This is one place where the encoder resolution of the wheelbase also plays a role, but more on that in a moment.
So while DirectInput has done the job for 30+ years now, manufacturers are starting to look for other ways to overcome its limitations, and this is done in a variety of ways….
API level - Telemetry Based Effects
API Level - Telemetry Based Force Feedback (FFB)
This is arguably the most “complete” way of handling things, at least in theory, as it allows the manufacturer to override DirectInput altogether and handle all effects (haptics and constant force) based on the game’s physics engine in their own way with low latency, but comes with the same caveats as API Level Telemetry Based Effects mentioned above.
At the time of writing, no manufactures are relying solely on API Level Telemetry Based Force Feedback, although Simucube are beginning to experiement with a few elements with the new Simucube 3.
LFE (Low Frequency Effects)
LFE essentially interfaces with the wheelbase (or other devices like a haptic pad/buttkicker transducer, etc) like it’s an audio device. Multi channel effects can be either generated by the game’s physics, or “canned” effects can be triggered by telemetry based events like ABS kicking in, Engine RPM, Gear shifts, etc.
This achieves pretty much the same result as what we currently see with Logitech’s “TrueForce” and Fanatec’s “Fullforce”, but with a higher latency and more limitations in terms of channel separation, bandwidth, etc.
Telemetry based FFB (UDP or Shared Memory)
VNM took matters into their own hands in the last few years and introduced wheelbases which are able to take the UDP or Shared Memory telemetry most sim racing titles already output, and use it to generate their own Force Feedback (albeit with varying results). This works in a similar manner to a lot of the FFB mods you see out there like IrFFB for iRacing, etc.
The advantage of this is that this method does not require game developers to integrate an API, so theoretically it can work with any sim that outputs telemetry, but in practice, different sims output vastly different telemetry. Another issue is that latency of UDP and Shared Memory generated FFB and effects tends to fall somewhere between 15 and 30ms, which to some people (including myself) is noticeable as a slight lag between what you feel and what the car is actually doing in the sim.
More recently, VNM has introduced another method of generating force feedback called “TIC”. This allows users to adjust the ratio between Direct and Telemetry based FFB to dial in the sweet spot to their personal preference. I expect this is an approach we will see more of from other brands in the future, so keep it in the back of your mind.
Sample Rate:
As mentioned earlier, many manufacturers will list a force feedback sample rate of 1000Hz, which is the maximum supported by the DirectInput protocol we already discussed. But in reality, most sims actually output their FFB at a much lower rate. In such cases, much like what we see with the motion smoothing technologies we see employed in modern televisions, hardware manufacturers are able to interpolate (or fill the gaps between packets of data with “fake” generated data) to smooth things out. This is usually presented in the form of an “Interpolation” or “Force Feedback Recreation” Filter which you’ll find in most manufacturer’s software these days.
iRacing is perhaps the most impacted by this as their physics engine runs at 60Hz or 60 samples per second. Some manufacturers have managed to work around this and increase the sample rate to 360Hz, but this works by sending six 60Hz FFB packets at once, rather than updating once per cycle. This higher rate is used to provide more detailed and refined road texture, curb, and other road surface feedback, while the game’s main simulation still runs at 60Hz, However this adds about 16ms of latency which may be noticeable by some people.
Long story short, interpolating (or somewhat intelligently guessing) what the wheelbase should be doing between actual samples is tricky business to get right, and some manufacturers do a better job than others. This is one of the key areas where subtle differences in driving feel between brands start to become noticeable beyond just strength and responsiveness.
Slew Rate:
This has become a topic of hot debate in the last few years. Slew Rate is essentially a measurement of the maximum rate at which the motor can respond to a large change in state (sudden spike in force or change of direction, etc). A higher slew rate, among other things which we’ll get to shortly, will result in a more lively and reactive feeling wheel with sharper, finer detail, all other things being equal of course.
But there comes a point where the motor becomes unrealistically snappy, so a higher slew rate number doesn’t automatically mean a better driving experience, and most people end up capping the slew rate lower on most high end wheelbases to tame the beast.
Rotating Mass:
This is pretty simple, the more mass the motor has to deal with, the more motor strength will be required to achieve the same feel for the driver (once again, all other things being equal of course). So while some weaker motors may be perfectly fine with lighter wheels, they will struggle to respond to what the car is doing quickly enough and start to feel disconnected from the car when you try and use them with a heavier wheel. The result being numb and sluggish feeling force feedback and a lack of fine detail. Many manufacturers go to great lengths to reduce the weight of the entire rotating mass of the motor stator and shaft to mitigate this as much as possible without introducing undue flex or reliability issues (with varying degrees of success). Importantly, driving with a larger diameter wheel will also produce more leverage which has a similar impact on the driving feel. So if you like rallying with a large diameter wheel and strong force feedback, you’re likely more suited to a more powerful base than someone who’s only driving formula style cars with a small, lightweight wheel.
Encoder Resolution:
All wheelbases need to have a feedback loop that tells the firmware as well as the sim exactly where the wheel is through its rotation. In simple terms, encoder resolution is the number of points of resolution a wheelbase has to understand its relative position through 360 degrees of rotation.
To throw a few numbers at you, A 16 bit encoder has a resolution of 65,536, so it’s able to understand 65,536 individual points through a 360 degree rotation, whereas a 24 bit encoder has a resolution of 16.7MILLION! Yeah that’s a big difference, but it is argued by many that 16 bit is more than enough. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
It’s also worth noting that most sims scale back the input to 16 bit anyway, but of course this doesn’t impact the motor’s internal feedback loop.
All I can really tell you here is that the bases we’ve tested with 21 bit or higher resolution do tend to be the ones that lend themselves to a smoother overall driving feel (placebo? Maybe. We’re talking about very subtle differences here), but there are a lot of other factors at play here, so I certainly wouldn’t say this is the only thing you should pay attention to.
Cogging & Torque Ripple:
All electric motors (regardless of axial flux, outrunner, inrunner, etc) rely on electrified coils passing through an electromagnetic field to produce movement. This by nature means that there will be variations in the magnetic attraction as the motor shaft rotates. This results in the sensation of “cogging” or “torque ripple”. If you’ve ever noticed your wheel feels like it wants to kind of jump into the next position as you rotate it rather than being completely smooth, you have experienced this.
More expensive motors will minimise this at a hardware level by increasing the pole count, etc, but this can also be mitigated to an extent at least at a software/firmware level by mapping the magnetic fields and then varying the power outputted by the motor as it passes through these variances in the magnetic field. The encoder feedback loop we talked about earlier, along with a clever algorithm and a bunch of processing power to handle this in close to realtime is required to pull this off, but it’s important to keep in mind minimising this at a hardware level is always the better option (cost aside) as it means the full dynamic range of the motor is available for producing the effects you feel through the wheel.
Importantly, we’ve seen many brands completely transform the driving experience and go from feeling quite notchy, to achieving almost no noticeable cogging effect purely through firmware and software updates. Fanatec’s DD1 and DD2 are a great example of this.
So now you have a much better understanding from a hardware point of view of the various elements that go together to determine the driving experience when using a direct drive wheelbase.
The reality is that most mainstream manufacturers have pretty much nailed the above within the cost limitations at any given price point. Where the majority of the difference will be found between brands at a given price point will be in terms of compatibility, build quality, software and the ecosystem of other products available. So now you understand the fundamentals, head on over to our Direct Drive Buyer’s Guide to get a better understanding of which products may best suit you!
For comparisons between Direct Drive Wheelbases and details of each major brand’s ecosystem, make sure you check out The Essential Direct Drive Sim Racing Buyer’s Guide HERE.
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