I have been playing GT6 all day today, and I gotta say I love it. It's great and in most ways a big improvement over GT5 (but where are the used cars??
)
Anyway, I think it's good that someone brought the question about blurring/anti-aliasing up. I thought most people knew after the GT6 demo that GT6 would have more blur..? It was the first thing I thought when I played the GT6 demo, that they have added some kind of heavy anti-aliasing effect. I think it's very obvious, just like Tom says, and a Eurogamer article by Digital Foundry later proved that. It's a good read, I think people who questioned Tom's tv and resolution etc. should read
the article.
Here a screenshot I took using their comparison tool that can be found in that article (check it in full size):
As it says they have added MLAA, the same "secret" that have made some other ps3 exclusives look as good as they do recently.
As I understand it is like this: MLAA is a post-process thing, meaning that it is the CPU that takes care of it instead of the GPU. The benefit it that you get a anti-aliased, softened image without draining the GPU of processing power. The downside can be increased shimmering, higher latency and, as seems to be GT6's case, worse framerate.
I think it's good that this is being discussed, because it's obvious that Polyphony Digital has gone a different path this time when it comes to graphics.
In GT1-GT5 framerate during gameplay was sacred, 60fps almost always locked (with a few exceptions, like when running 16 players online in GT5). In GT5 they even allowed tearing in the image, probably to keep the framerate up. (This is just speculation, but I have a strong feeling this is the case). In GT6 the framerate can fall under 45fps at times it seems.
This time it seems that they have tried to add more more blur ala Forza Motorsport by using MLAA. (Perhaps you have noticed that GT6 now has a little of that "shiny blurred tarmac" effect that could be found in i.e. Forza Motorsport 3?)
Personally, since MLAA is CPU intensive, I think the framerate issues in GT6 would perhaps disappear if MLAA was disabled. The CPU in GT6 probably handles a lot of things (physics! astronomy!) so letting it handle the anti-aliasing as well is probably a bit reason why the framerate isn't consistent.
But then of course if blur is good or bad thing is a very, very subjective thing