I have watched the direct feed like you and I have a question. I apologize in advance as I dont want to derail the thread but I need to ask. A lot has been made of Wii U hardware/tech or lack thereof. Assuming ps360 could even hit the same visual quailty do you think they could run it at 60fps? I have seen some people post this game really is not impressive its just the artstyle and ps360 could easily handle this. Just wondering your thoughts?
It's hard to tell just from looking at footage, but we do have some historical data that could help us here:
1. The only kart racer to hit 60fps on the ps360 (that I'm aware of) is F1 Race Stars. Unfortunately, that one might not be very indicative, as it's multiplat and as such suffers from the 'jack of all platforms, master of none' syndrome; can't speak of its ps360 versions, but its WiiU port suffers from fps degradation on some tracks - the only guaranteed-stable 60fps is on the gamepad at reduced resolution (how they managed to burn up fillrate in that game is beyond me). If we still used that game as some sort of a basis, though, MK8 is on an entirely different level in terms of lighting, vehicle dynanics and animations. So, at 60fps, MK8 does stand unchallenged.
2. Dropping down to 30fps, Sonic Transformed is a good basis for comparison - it uses similar rendering techniques (i.e. deferred shading) and strives for a similar look-n-feel as MK8. Now, it's all subjecive, of course, but I find the results of deferred shading in MK8 much more satisfactory than Sonic's - the sense of physical presense of the objects on screen is much stronger in MK8 than it's in Sonic, and that is normally an indication of good lighting - our brains are very sensistive when it comes to lighting believabilty and the resulting cognition of physical presense.
Generally, 360
might have been able to pull something in MK8's ballpark (i.e. visuals and fps), if it wasn't for the absolutely inadequate amount of eDRAM that console had - 10MB of fb is not something you put on an HD console, at least not if you expect deferred shading to reach its full potential. Dunno about PS3 - it surely would've been able to pull the animations and vehicles dynamics thanks to its excess of cpu FLOPS, but its GPU was its achilles heel so that might or might not have been able to pull it all at 60 fps.