They're improving the exterior graphics for the standard cars?
Look at the front wheel covers or pylons or whatever you want to call them. No standard car has a surface that smooth, and if they did you can eat my hat. Obviously curvy standard car will gain the most, but all should pick up much better visuals.
Can someone post a pic of the C60 from a similar angle for comparison? I had a quick search and couldn't find anything worth comparing (poor quality, blurred, etc). I could of course be wrong, but I honestly don't remember standards being that smooth, even after 1.10 updated their visuals.
The reflections, therefore, are much improved. It also seems like the texture resolution has been upped a bit over the current standard Pescarolo. It's hard to say from a compressed image like that, but the textures COULD be anywhere up to current Forza standards. Maybe. Most likely 1024, POSSIBLY more (though not very likely).
The problem is the way GT5 currently handles liveries - much more reliant on good material settings, allowing better texture usage.
If you can have metal looking more like metal with the shader alone, then you can use more texture space for the decals and what not (see the GT5 Audi R10). Of course, to do this, every Standard car would have to be re-unwrapped (imagine unwrapping a LMP1 car, I dare you) to deal with this, as previous (and most current) racers haven't had this opportunity before.
The other drawback is that anything that isn't smooth OR part of the old mesh won't be as good as a straight premium. The vents on LMP1 cars, the huge amount of interior detail in the open LMP cars, etc.
I can say from experience that the interior of the car is a pain to work on when you're down to details, as are panels of vents that are part of the bodywork contours, and that means time. But apparently not much-needed extra man-power, according to SONY.
Hope someone found this insightful or interesting, and won't just jump on the standards-look-to-be-getting-visual-bump bandschwimmwagon.