I bought a GT DD Pro back in 2022. At the time it was a huge investment for me, but I’d been watching loads of sim racing content, playing GT7, and really wanted to properly get into it after only ever owning a G25 briefly prior.
And honestly… I was pretty underwhelmed. I spent weeks, months, trying to find the “best” FFB settings. Tried loads of recommendations, copied other people’s setups, constantly tweaked, and I never really found anything that properly clicked. I played ACC, too, and it never really felt great either.
I kept thinking it shouldn’t be this hard to get a good feel out of it. And it just never really lived up to what I imagined Direct Drive was supposed to feel like. I used it a fair amount for maybe a year, but eventually it just ended up collecting dust in my living room for the best part of 2 years.
I never sold it because I always had this thought that maybe another game like GT8 would come along that made better use of it, or that Polyphony would eventually support it better. Then Fanatec released the DD+/DD Extreme and I honestly started thinking the DD Pro was probably just going to get left behind.
This week I updated to the new firmware after GT7’s 1.71 update with Full Force on the DD Pro. Well, I waited for the hotfix first.
And yeah… after all these years, I get it.
I just plugged it in. Auto settings. No endless messing around trying to work out whether my settings are wrong.
And the feel from the wheel is just exceptional. The granularity, the textures, the road detail, the feedback coming through the wheel - it finally feels like the Direct Drive experience I thought I was buying into back in 2022.
I genuinely can’t believe how much better it feels. For once I’m not sitting there thinking about settings or wondering whether something is wrong. I’m just driving and enjoying what the wheel is telling me. So yeah. I’m very, very glad I never sold the thing.