New Project Gotham Racing 3 preview. Good information.

[Prince of China]

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/643/643992p1.html

 

[Cole]

After giving us all the pertinent background information on the game, Nick fired up an X360 dev kit and jumped into PGR 3. The first thing I noticed was that the graphics were definitely toned down from the screenshots we've seen. Although it looked decent enough, the effects weren't pumped to the max and all the texture passes weren't active, so we weren't treated to the amazing visuals we've come to expect from the screens that have been released.

The environments looked quite nice at this point, with realistic textures on all the buildings, but there was some quite severe pop-in from buildings in the distance as Nick drove around a track in Tokyo. The frame rate was also a bit choppy at this point, but Nick told us that the game was running at about a third of the speed they plan to get out of the final version, which should achieve 60 frames per second.

If you think about all this in your head. You may question if the screenshots are the exact results we will get. I am actually guessing a little worse?
Yes it's only using 60% of the xbox 360's power, but they still need ot fix the pop-in from buidlings, and pump up the graphics to correct level...that may take enough performance to make the graphics slightly worse.
None the less it would still look good.

btw, when they say 60% of the xbox 360's power, that may not mean anything about the graphics. What if that extra 40% has nothing to do with GPU power? So I think that most of that power has to do with the CPU, and only have to do with the gpu a little.

So, I am ready to say, "I'll believe those graphics when I see those graphics."

To add on, we havn't seen any big physic demos on the Xbox 360 have we? This adds more to the possibility. Maybe we havn't seen such things is because they are waiting for the more powerfull kits that will provide the power to do massive physic calculations.