How to Set the Right Field of View in Sim Racing Games

For my first two years of sim racing I ran a field of view somewhere around 80 degrees, because that was the default and it felt fast. I braked late everywhere, put a wheel on the grass at the same three corners every race, and blamed my pedals. The pedals were fine. The picture on the screen was lying to me about how far away the corners were.

Field of view is the setting most new sim racers leave alone, and it quietly affects almost everything else: braking points, how close you think the car beside you is, even whether the game feels slow. The good news is that it is pure geometry. You can work out the right number with a tape measure and two minutes, and you only have to do it once per setup.

Why the default number feels good and drives badly

A game's default FOV is chosen to look exciting on a big variety of screens, so it is usually wide, often 70 to 90 degrees horizontally. A wide view squeezes more of the world onto your monitor. That squeezing makes everything in front of you look smaller, and your brain reads smaller as farther away. The track also rushes past the edges of the screen, which is where the sense of speed comes from.

The result is a car that feels quick and corners that arrive sooner than you expected. You brake at the board you picked, the board was closer than it looked, and you run wide. Then you move the braking point back, overcompensate, and lose time on the next lap. I have watched league rookies do this for a whole season without suspecting the view.

A correct FOV does the opposite. It matches the angle your monitor actually covers from your eyes, so a metre on screen looks like a metre. It will feel slow at first. Almost everyone I have helped set this up says the same thing on day one: "this is boring". By day three most of them have stopped running wide.

Measuring it properly

You need three numbers: the visible width of your screen, its visible height, and the distance from your eyes to the screen surface while you sit in your normal driving position. Measure the picture, not the bezel. Then the angles are:

Horizontal FOV = 2 × arctan(width ÷ 2 ÷ distance), and the same with height for vertical FOV.

Any phone calculator with a tan button will do this, and there are several free FOV calculators online that ask for the same inputs. Here are the figures for some setups I have measured on my own desk or on friends' rigs, rounded to one decimal place.

Look at how small those numbers are compared with an 80 degree default. A single monitor at a normal desk distance covers roughly 40 to 55 degrees of your vision, and no amount of wishing changes that.

One trap catches people constantly: some sims want a vertical value and others want horizontal. Put a horizontal 53 into a slider that expects vertical and you get a wide, stretched view that is worse than the default. Check the sim's own notes or the tooltip next to the setting. A few titles, the official F1 games among them, use an offset slider rather than degrees, and there you match by eye using a known object, such as the width of the steering wheel on screen against the width of your real wheel.

"Just move the screen closer" is half right

The usual forum answer to a correct FOV feeling too narrow is to move the monitor closer. It is good advice, with a limit people forget. Moving a 27 inch screen from 80 cm to 60 cm lifts the horizontal angle from 41 to 53 degrees, which is a real gain. Past a certain point, though, the monitor collides with your wheel, or you end up looking over the wheel rim at the bottom third of the screen.

On my own desk the wheel base clamps about 25 cm in front of the screen, and the rim blocks the lower edge if the monitor sits any lower. I raised the monitor on a cheap riser by 9 cm so the horizon in the game lines up with my eye height. That one change mattered more than the last few centimetres of distance, because I stopped craning my neck to see the apex.

If the space really will not allow a closer screen, a slightly wider FOV than the calculated one is an honest compromise. Five or six degrees over the true value is fine. Thirty is not.

What changed in my own driving

I keep a notebook for a handful of reference combos. In a Mazda MX-5 Cup car around Lime Rock, my laps got about 0.4 seconds slower in the first two sessions after I switched to the correct value. Two weeks later I was 0.6 seconds quicker than before the change, and the bigger difference was consistency. My spread across a ten lap run dropped from around nine tenths to under four tenths.

The reason, as far as I can tell, is braking. With true scale the brake boards and kerbs sit where they really are, so the reference points I picked in practice held up in the race. If you have been working through braking points before anything else, a correct FOV is what makes those points trustworthy. It also helps in close racing, because the car alongside appears at its true distance, which is a lot of what makes the cockpit view build real awareness in the first place.

I should be honest about the limit of my evidence. This is one driver, one car, a handful of tracks. I have seen the same pattern in the six or so friends I have set up since, but that is not a study.

Triples and VR are a different conversation

Triple screens let you keep true scale and still see the car beside you, because you add real degrees rather than faking them. Most serious sims include a triple screen option where you enter the side screen angle as well. VR sidesteps the question completely, since the headset sets the view for you. Neither is cheap, and neither fixes a wrong number on a single screen, so start there first. The rest of the basic rig setup is in our wheel setup tips.

Your task for this week

Sit in your normal driving position, measure your screen's visible width and height and your eye distance, and work out both angles. Enter the right one in the one sim you race most, then commit to it for five sessions before you judge it. Expect the first one to feel slow. Write down your best lap and your lap spread before and after, and you will have your own answer instead of mine. More hardware notes live under racing gear.