The course maker is unlikely to be any smaller than
Sierra.
This, plus I think there are differences in texture filtering.
The PS2 was a custom piece of hardware, the RSX is basically a standard PC-spec GPU, so, programatically speaking, it inherits the same processes that PCs have used for some time, whereas the PS2 was lightyears ahead of anything else in terms of its programmable shading capabilities and its capacity for screen effects in general.
Having seen the raw textures pulled out of the games, PD did indeed use some fancy texture tricks on the cars back in the PS2 era.
I'm quoting myself for maximum win.
EDIT: And double posting...
On the subject of the PS2's shading capabilities:
www.gamedev.net/topic/256746-question-about-ps2-shader-capabilities/
Quite fascinating what could be done when you can code right down to the metal and not have to wrestle with a restrictive API (PC).
It seems the (relative) power of the PS2 came from its ability to render to anywhere in the unified memory space and use that as a texture for any effect; leveraging the programmable vector units (intended for vertices, but it doesn't know what the numbers represent) to speed things up. The insane screen bandwidth meant that frame-to-frame effects were possible, which couldn't be done anywhere else at the time.
I wonder how much of that capability was lost on PS3, perhaps explaining some of the "pixelated" quirks of the Standards. Certainly, a lot of the texture format and render / processing flexibility must have disappeared on PS3 in general, but for a lot of the "per-pixel"-like effects, that loss would be covered by the fragment shaders in the RSX. Of course, the return of the shared memory and the bespoke vector units, plus those wacky SPUs, still allow for some interesting non-PC-like effects.
That's my main gripe with the PS4 at the moment; it seems to be too easy to get that plastic PC-graphics feel you get from using the same limited tools. Consoles have always had more "organic" graphics, due to the above kinds of flexibilities in the ways the hardware can be made to dance around from the software level, different from game to game.
In a weird near-backward step, the PS4 doesn't have "proper" unified memory access, because the hardware wasn't ready. It has something approximating it in theory, but I don't think we've seen anything of it yet (the
developer tools were not ready at the console's launch) - hopefully that'll change soon, no doubt PD will need those advanced features to get the most out of the console.
Here's a nice article on what AMD hope to achieve in general - that "organic" graphical capability may become universal one day, not to mention the "GPGPU" aspect...
Went a bit off-topic there, perhaps, but I just think it's interesting what effect the hardware has on the content.
With the current SDK, perhaps the Standards would look even uglier on PS4, aside from the relative difference to the backgrounds etc.
But in seriousness, I'd be more worried about how the presentation of the Premiums carries over if there's a problem with getting the hardware flexibility in software (SDK features) that PD have become used to.
