My guess is they are using VGA cables and are getting an upscaled image.

Yeah.. I want one. Has great range for an electric motor too. Around 200 miles on a single charge.. which only takes a few hours to juice up.

The great thing about stored power is -- it can come from any source. It's future proof. They're expensive though. 100k+ and there's a waiting list to match the price. Pretty awesome efficiency all around though. An impressive car and a proof of concept if you ask me.. proof that electric motors can haul ass.

http://www.teslamotors.com/

It's a pretty badass car. I didn't even know it was in PGR4 until I played it.. I would love to test drive (or own) one in real life. It's the greenest sports car you could possibly buy. I'd rather own a Tesla Roadster than the Elise it's modeled after.. even though it costs like 100,000 more (if you include the security deposit to get on the waiting list).

Pretty badass though. I'm glad there are motor companies abroad that are experimenting with advancements in stored energy. Ethanol and battery power will never receive serious research in the states because our automotive industry is in the grips of big oil. The Chevy Volt is a freaking JOKE. "Gas friendly to gas free" my ass Chevy! It's a plug-in hybrid.. yet they call it an "extended range electric motor." What a load of shit.

40 miles w/o Gasoline. Who are they fooling?

/rant

Not sure if this as been posted?

a comparison vid of PGR3 & 4

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?i...

I think the issue is diminishing returns.

Imagine a wheel in polygons where each generation there is an 8x increase in power.

Gen 1: 4 polygons
Gen 2: 32 polygons
Gen 3: 256 polygons
Gen 4: 2048 polygons

Gen 1 to 2 is absolutely massive. Gen 2 to 3 is large, but not as noticable. Some blemishes, but very small in worse case scenarios. Gen 3 to 4 is very minor with only a cleaning up of worst case scenarios.

Now broaden this concept. Take shadows. You go from a blob, to a rough shape of the object, to a perspective correct siloutte, to one with self shadows, and then soft shadows, and finally proper occlusion and fading. The more "correct" you get the less future improvements matter.

So PGR4 has soft shadows, realtime reflections, and so forth. Technically these are a huge leap in technique as well as performance demand. [Sorry inflatable, go check a PC game where you can enable and disable soft shadows and THEN come tell me that the performance required is minimal]

The problem is that most gamers are quite casual in regards to IQ and graphic aren't able to appreciate that soft shadows from hard shadows is as big of a leap as 4 polygons to 32 polygons.

If you have a PC game running at 30fps and then do the following:

+ Increase resolution 50%
+ Increase AF
+ Go from static geometry reflections with no MSAA to realtime reflections with MSAA
+ Go from harder, lower resolution / relatively poorly filtered shadows to a fine filtered (VSM?) soft shadow
+ Enabled an intensive particle system (rain/snow, puddles, ground reflections, smoke, etc)
+ New maps with more geometric complexity than previous content

That PC game won't be running at 30fps if it was GPU bound.

BC absolutely got a LOT more out of PGR4. The problem is people aren't familiar with the demands of the improvements. Put in the context of enabling these features on the PC, though, is a perfect example of how BC was able to take hugely demanding features and increase the resolution AND keep the same performance levels.

That sounds like getting more out of the hardware to me.

Jolli, the 360 has a lot more potential than tapped in the first year just by the nature of multicore and the hurdles and adjustments developers are making. Ease of development and extracting performance aren't always the same thing.

No, I just trust you don't know what you are talking about in most situations relating to technology.

Like I said, ease of development != Extracting Performance. Those concepts can overlap, but they are not the same. The Xbox 360 has better tools and is easier to work with than the Xbox. But getting peak performance from the 360 is much, much more difficult. You have to thread your shaders, create a robust task model for CPU thread utilization, explore a programmable shading model that has a slew of techniques still outside the typically software pipeline, and so forth. And the little thing called Tiling...

In general you will find that extracting peak performance from Cell is easier than from EE; and extracting peak performance from Xenon is much more diffuclt than from the x86 Coppermine Xbox CPU. It isn't a neat

EE/Cell > harder > Xbox/Xenon

It is more

Cell > easier > EE
x86 > easier > Xenon

As much problems developers are having with Cell, EE was much, much worse. The reason most didn't see it is because the PS2 was the lead platform all generation. The Xbox was limited by the PS2 in many ways.

We are seeing more issues this gen because the 360 was the lead sku (that is changing) and PS3 -- not just Cell, but RSX too -- just don't handle 360 code/assets well. But the PS3 is MUCH easier to work with than the PS2.

So grouping the PS3 with PS2 really isn't represenative of the issues. Ditto the Xbox and Xbox 360 as the 360 has a lot more headroom in 2007 than the Xbox did in 2003.

Basically, it isn't as simple as you describe it. But leave it to Jolli to take something out of context.