First, the normal mapping and texture resolutions are excellent. You can see enormous amounts of detail in the cities if you happen to ever have the time to stop and look around. Underneath that is an unprecedented amount of geometry. There are literally 80,000 polygons per car -- 40,000 just for the interior, and 40,000 for the exterior. When you get into the cockpit mode, the dashboard sparkles with highly refined objects. Plus, the inside rattles and blurs and the driver moves quickly and with motion-captured moves. Crazy!
The reflections on the cars are all in real time and showing true reflections, and they don't just reflect from the shiny metal side panels, they reflect from the tire rims, the side mirrors, the chromed grills, even off the helmet of the driver inside the car. The crowd is wildly varied -- although they're generic looking -- but the roads, the buildings, and trees, the city architecture, they are all extremely well done. Bizarre gave us a little stat sheet to describe its research into the visuals: It took more than 22,000 reference photographs and 10 hours of video to build the game, and the Brooklyn Bridge, by itself, uses more polygons than an entire city on PGR1.
