Hello fellow Sim Racers! I'm sure to most sim racers, a Motion sim rig would be most desirable and final item on the bucket list to have. I will be discussing all the different setup I've experienced and owned through out the years and my thoughts and recommendation on which setup is worth spending for.

A little background of myself. I've been in the Sim Racing/Driving industry for over a decade, I've started a popular Sim Center from the ground up, created countless cars and track mods for various of sims, been involve in creating sim racing into an e-sport, worked with various of car manufacturers and professional race teams and has been involve in actually development work of building my own sim racing title. Although the development is still work in progress, and couldn't really talk much about what's going on, but that is a topic for another day. Currently I'm building my YouTube channel focus on VR Sim Racing. www.youtube.com/c/vrdriving Please help me out by subscribing and hopefully my channel could grow and I could speed up the development process of my own sim title!

Anyways back on topic, over the years I have owned and tried various of motion sim hardware. Both seat movers and platform based motion setup. A common misconception for motion rigs is that it supplies the user with G Force simulation. The truth is quite the opposite. G Force simply could not be replicated in a sub $10k setup. What a good motion platform does is provide additional feedback based on suspension data and actually replicating the feeling of actually driving a car on a road. What usually makes a great driving car in the real world usually comes from steering feedback and also the feedback transfer from the suspension components of the car.

For seat movers, I've tried the SimXperience setup, CXC and Next Level. I'm not going to go into details of seat movers, but my advice is stay away from them as they do not add anything to the sim racing experience and it just doesn't work. All you get is a seat that shakes vigorously! For the most obvious reason is that you would never drive a car with a seat shaking around! You would be better off investing in a Direct Drive, VR headset, better pedals than buying any seat moving motion setup.

Platform base motion is another story. For platforms, the most popular and expensive one would have to be DBOX, I have also tried the SPT-1000 and X-Motion from China, which is basically a direct replica of the DBOX. Both the SPT-1000 and X-Motion is roughly 1/3 the cost of the DBOX, but there is a something important that nobody has mentioned.

You might think these actuated setup would work the same, but reality is all three of these setup feels completely different. Out of all reviews I have seen on motion hardware is that nobody ever mention the importance of the software each hardware platform are supplied with. The setup process for the DBOX is straight forward and refined like you expect with any modern computer accessories, the SPT and X-Motion was a pain to get going. In fact for the X Motion, I needed the Chinese manufacturer to help me get it working via Team-viewer initially until I learned what they did to make it work, adjusting com ports, typing commands in the console and installing various of undocumented files into Windows is not exactly plug and play! The SPT was a little easier to get going, but the hardware quality felt more like a DIY project than proper manufactured product. Both the SPT and X-Motion did something very wrong in their motion profile, both of these setup takes the G Force data from the sim and applies it into the motion. In theory this should work well, but at the end all you get the motions but not road feedback from the car itself. DBOX on the other hand takes this approach differently and base their motion on how the car behaves via the suspension. What you get is feedback from every bumps and curbs of the road surface, further enhancing the FFB feel. The downside is that with DBOX, the motion you get is not as exaggerated as those that takes only G Force data, but you get a much more accurate feel of the car. On the plus side, the DBOX is able to replicate one of the toughest simulated feedback, which is the clutch bite point. The vibration and subtle motion the DBOX provide is able to provide accurate clutch feedback with basically any clutch pedal setup. In the end, the only setup I could recommend to all fellow sim racers is the DBOX setup. It is by far the most expensive setup, but it also have the easiest software setup (plug and play) and has the most extensive motion profile support for almost every sim available. If you were to save up for a motion platform, save a little more and get the best setup, it is worth every penny and its unbelievable with VR!

There are two motion platforms, a 6 dof system and a 3 dof system. I am thinking of adding a Vr motion rig in my VR arcade for both racing and flight sim. Obviously the 3 dof is cheaper but can be upgraded with another under chassis to make it into a 5/6 dof system. I just want to get some opionions from random internet strangers :) If you had any experience with any of these systems, which one would you prefer?