How am I a troll? and isn't it against the AUP to call someone a a troll?
Yeah I preferred the sunset lighting, If they'd kept it maybe it would masked some of the uglier parts of the tracks scenery. To me it's obvious that this Motegi is an upscaled Gt4 track, that lighting aside, hasn't had a whole lot else done to (arguably) improve it. It's of a similar quality to tracks like Trial Mountain, Deep Forest, Cote D'Azure.....
The newly modelled Ps3 tracks are on a completley different level in terms of shader complexity, textures, lighting, polycount, etc.
I don't see how Spa is any more of a 'tunnel' than Motegi, and besides tracks like Eiger shows, by being far more open than it in scale and remaining visually far superior, that this isn't a factor in the gulf in image quality between Gt5's premium and standard tracks.
To me Motegi is clearly a tier below Gt5 -specific tracks. This, I believe should be obvious to anyone who compares them with a clean (objective) pair of eyes.
Hey, you were calling me an "apologist". I have no idea what one is in this context, but it can't be "good" in your eyes, now, can it? Deal with that and we'll deal with the conditionally-issued "troll" comment.
What does "upscaled" mean in this instance? For example, what has been "upscaled" at Côte D'Azur, or Deep Forest? I don't think anything has actually been truly "upscaled" (i.e. interpolated), they've just re-used some / all of GT4's development textures for those tracks (different from those actually used in the game), everything else is new.
Spa is a "tunnel" in the sense that there is a lot of terrain area that doesn't have track on it, inside the confines of the track. Most of that is occluded by the terrain (banks, hills and valleys) or by barriers and trees - when you can see it, it's usually from a distance. Eiger is the same; the distances involved mean the terrain textures still look OK, and there are a few tree "tunnels" in places, too, on the longer variants (which are just detailed ribbons over the terrain mesh, a bit like a hand-tuned version of a course-generator track).
There are ways to optimise dense scenery and high-detail meshes, but not without cost. I appreciate that London is a "tunnel", but still has the worst performance in the game - I expect that's due to a lack of a sophisticated polygon culling scheme (which is not a free process in itself), so all the buildings constitute quite a rendering challenge whenever there is a change in the visibility structure of the track as you race around it - presumably they've got better at handling this visibility issue with the newer city tracks.
Motegi has little unused space within the track's confines, and its "tunnels" (the Super Speedway doesn't really count, it's high-detail, like London) are much,
much wider than at Spa. So line of sight is a bigger problem, especially because it's "flat", on the side of a hill, as opposed to across a valley like at Spa (in a forest) or Eiger (in the mountains - sparse scenery). And if this same lack of culling applies (for example, on geometry on the other side of the Super Speedway), then sacrifices will have had to have been made. Again, the texture quality is apparently so low perhaps because they've re-used the same textures from GT4, albeit at their slightly higher pre-production resolutions - that's unfortunate, but what's interesting is it's not
that much of a step down from textures on other tracks. In fact I suspect the apparent difference is because the textures weren't generated and attributed from scratch in the new engine, rather than any real deficit in resolution (i.e. using GT4's texturing
scheme in GT5 is sub-optimal). You can bet the geometry is mostly new, including and especially the track ribbons (everything up to the barriers), which is most important, and being totally overlooked.
In summary, what everyone seems to be picking up on is only really what they perceive to be sub-par texture quality, although I'd argue you can see that everywhere in the game. The geometry must be new, however, because it lacks GT4's spikiness. That's not technically "upscaling", that's going back to the source data and re-factoring it.
So, please can we separate the texture quality from the rest of the graphics?
