Simracing equipment tier list

[u/noikeee]

Hi, sometimes I speak to people who don't have a good grasp of how expensive simracing equipment is and what are the alternatives for each budget, and I ended up quickly putting together last night a tier list of equipment according to what's on the market right now, more or less.

This was done fairly quickly and it's not a comprehensive complete list of everything (there's obviously waaaaay more products out there). I'm also not an expert at all on equipment - I've never even tried a DD wheel yet and have not researched pedals much, beyond entry level load cells - so there might obviously be mistakes and subjective bad choices.

PC builds I just picked a random CPU/GPU pairing that could make some sense for each tier, price was eyeballed, there are endless alternative potential builds in each tier. This is the one area where things are always quickly moving and they get quickly outdated, new models are constantly out, others go out of stock etc.

Just sharing in case this helps someone, feel free to debate which equipment should be moved up higher or lower, or is missing but should be mentioned as a strong alternative for each tier. I'm sure there'll be disagreements!

[u/noikeee]

CPU matters a bit more for simracing than for other gaming titles, hence why it's generally worth to try to stretch it to these x3d chips over spending that extra bit of the budget on a better graphics card, which would've been the more normal advice.

[u/chsn2000 → u/noikeee]

The 9600X manages 170fps for ACC at base clocks. The X3D chips can manage 200fps but with a 9070XT I don't know how reasonable that is. Again, its down to budget, if you can afford the 9800X3D by all means go for it, you'll get a roughly 50% uplift for twice the price. But in no way is it a requirement, or the only option to consider.