Early Access continues its development with Release 0.8, bringing new content, additional user generated content abilities and a major VR rework.
Where 0.7 opened the door to the AC EVO car editor and the new particle system, 0.8 builds directly on that momentum across three fronts at once:
- A substantial content drop that adds three distinctive cars and a brand-new circuit in Kyalami - The next major step for the EVO user generated content ecosystem, with external livery creation and the arrival of multiplayer support for user generated content - A comprehensive VR overhaul that turns virtual reality into a credible, first-class way to experience the simulation.
This is a release that widens both what you can bring to EVO and where they can race it, extending the platform outward to the community while making every session, on track or in the headset, run cleaner and look sharper.
New Content
New Cars
Release 0.8 expands the roster with three additions that stretch from uncompromising track machinery to everyday all-weather performance, broadening the spread of disciplines represented in EVO.
KTM X-Bow GT2
One of the most extreme expressions of the modern GT2 class. Built around a lightweight carbon monocoque and a potent five-cylinder turbocharged engine, the X-Bow GT2 distils KTM’s stripped-back, function-first philosophy into a car of brutal directness. With minimal mass and serious aero, it rewards precision and commitment, and joins the EVO grid as one of its most focused customer-racing weapons.
KTM X-Bow GT4
The GT4-homologated sibling brings the same lightweight DNA into a more accessible package built to GT4 regulations. Agile, communicative and quick to reward clean inputs, it offers a natural entry point into structured customer racing: distinctive in silhouette, honest in behaviour, and an ideal counterpoint to the heavier metal elsewhere on the grid.
Volkswagen Golf 8 R
The all-wheel-drive flagship of the Golf range adds an everyday-usable, all-weather performance option to the roster, sitting naturally alongside the Golf 8 GTI that exists already in EVO. Composed, fast and deceptively capable, the Golf 8 R is the understated rocket of the line-up — proof that real pace doesn’t always announce itself.
New Track
Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit
Release 0.8 adds Kyalami, the historic South African circuit and a venue with deep Grand Prix heritage, now in its modern, FIA-graded layout. Set at high altitude near Johannesburg — where thinner air subtly reshapes engine output and aerodynamic load — Kyalami is a true driver’s circuit: a flowing, undulating sequence of fast esses and committed direction changes that rewards rhythm and bravery in equal measure. Long a fixture of international GT competition, it brings a genuinely distinctive challenge to the EVO track list.
User Generated Content Steps Up: External Liveries and Multiplayer Car Content
Release 0.8 takes the custom content story opened by 0.7 and pushes it decisively forward. Where the first car editor release was limited to Single Player, community-created cars can now be brought into Multiplayer!
On the Multiplayer side, the server launcher now supports modded car content, with a SHA verification layer that rejects modified cars or incorrect mod versions before they reach the grid. This keeps competitive integrity intact — every car on the server is the car it claims to be — while finally letting community content take its place in online racing. A new entry-list capability for defining starting order rounds out the toolset for organisers and league operators.
For creators, external livery creation support opens the second stage of the roadmap to versatility, moving beyond the car itself toward the personalisation layer that has always been central to Assetto Corsa culture and to the online racing community.
KUNOS Simulazioni and 505 Games encourage experimentation but do not endorse or take responsibility for community content that infringes trademarks, licences, brand guidelines or any other policy or law, or that compromises the game’s stability. Creators are asked to respect rights-holders and platform rules when producing and sharing content.
A Major Step Forward for VR
Release 0.8 delivers the most significant VR update of the Early Access cycle to date, reworking the headset experience around performance, clarity and comfort. The headline is foveated rendering, including an eye-tracked variant on supported hardware and more aggressive foveating presets, which concentrates rendering effort where the eye is actually looking, reclaiming performance without a visible cost to perceived sharpness.
Around it sits a full suite of new controls and optimisations: a pixel-density slider from 50% up to 150%, a world-scale option, supersampling, and a custom MSAA resolve tuned specifically for VR to reduce aliasing. VR now uses its own dedicated video-settings profile, separate from the flat-screen game, so headset and monitor configurations no longer compete. Performance-minded options, including a ‘prefer FPS over latency’ mode and an optimised pass that skips unnecessary work when upscalers are not in use, give players meaningful headroom to tune the experience to their rig, while the renderer now draws straight into the OpenXR swapchain to avoid an extra copy.
The first set of VR options is now exposed directly in the UI, with further settings to follow as the interface is completed (internal: a small number of VR options, including the VR sunglasses mode, are present but not yet fully tuned).
Further Core Improvements and Ongoing Development
Renderer: Dynamic VRAM Management and Visual Fidelity
0.8 continues the rendering overhaul begun with 0.7’s GPU-feedback texture streamer, this time centred on memory. New dynamically resizable texture and mesh streaming pools operate against a real-time VRAM budget, keeping memory use within the available headroom on a given GPU.
The work is backed by enhanced VRAM reporting and a new tracking category for non-streamed car resources such as numbers and decals, alongside a broad set of targeted optimisations across particles, clouds, material heaps, readback passes and shadow maps.
On the visual side, the release introduces supersampling and enhanced windshield rendering, complete with an updated wiper refraction effect and a new windshield raindrop splash that adds tangible texture to wet running. An updated panini projection improves wide field-of-view framing, HiZ occlusion now uses a reprojected view to mitigate the flickering of trees and other objects at culling edges, and an early-culling issue in mirrors on the ultra setting has been resolved.
Physics and Handling
Physics work in 0.8 focuses on the tyre-to-track relationship and a round of targeted fixes. The road temperature model has been reworked, and dynamic track maps have been rebaked using revised logic for more consistent grip evolution; weather and dynamic track behaviour has also received various fixes, with calibration still ongoing. Camber is now derived through a geometrical calculation, brake temperatures respond to electronic brake intervention, and rear-wheel steering has been corrected. Alongside these, excessive smoke generation has been fixed and the particle behaviour for wet grass has been addressed.
Gameplay
Several gameplay fixes sharpen the competitive modes. Hotstint timing, results and the lap counter have all been corrected, and a fuel-logic issue — where exceeding tank capacity during a pitstop still influenced stop time — has been fixed. Popup headlights are now correctly synchronised with the gameplay logic.
Multiplayer Stability
Beyond the new modded-content support, 0.8 delivers a substantial pass on online robustness. Multiple crash sources have been addressed — on joining a server, on failed connections, on session switching while a player is still loading, and on a startup edge case — and a freeze caused by input spamming during session join has been resolved. Admin commands now return clear feedback in server and MP chat, players can no longer open the pause menu while driving online, and a bug causing cars to take damage when spawning on a shared box has been fixed.
Graphics and Audio
Cloud levels have been remapped and the wet tarmac shader realigned to the new physics ranges, keeping the visual presentation consistent with the underlying simulation. Race cars now carry plain liveries and the material setup required for external liveries, supporting the modding work above. On audio, a timestamp comparison added to the collision-event filter removes a spurious bottoming sound, and the Ferrari Daytona SP3 receives updated gearbox sounds.
UI and General Stability
The paintshop gains a numberplate selector for relevant cars, and numberplate entry now caps to the maximum number of digits. A freecam widget that failed to show data with the showroom scene selector active has been fixed, and localisation has been updated. Under the hood, 0.8 resolves a crash when changing car setup as a session changes or restarts, adds protection for controls listening during those transitions, fixes a crash when launching the game from a mapped network drive, and removes the brief empty showroom that could appear before the splash screens.
