xboxyde has a
video of the first 10 minutes of full-auto..
There are some pretty harsh words about it's frame rate.
That said....
When I watch it, I don't notice the frame rate until:
a) it hitches,
b) it gets to a low detail area and jumps to ~60fps instead of 30
c) time gets out of sync slightly*
* what I mean by this, and I've seen (and coded) this badly, is when the game timing isn't accurate enough to account for the changing frame rate. I've seen this happen with performance counters on PCs when under heavy load, the results get innaccurate, or, more comonly, when the delta-time value is calculated as an average from the last X frames.
What effectivly results is that an event might occur that slows the game a lot, and those frames slow, but over the next X frames the game 'catches up'. It's technically not a frame rate drop, but to me it's really
really distracting and I can't stand it.
The full auto video has significant problems with this. Even some of the menu screens exhibit it, (when the camera spins around the car during setup a motion blur effect is applied which appears to do this).
Besides those issues I personally think that game looks quite awesome, and I'd be very proud to have been on the team that created it. It just seems a minor problem has crept in somewhere that is going to ruin the experience for a lot of people. Although that said the actual pauses that occur in the video are inexcusable.
I do wonder if differences occur between a gold and preproduction game (for example, the way the DVD is written.. something as simple as this could easily play havoc with a games content streaming code...)
Unrelated,
One thing that occurs in the video, is the car drives through extremly thick smoke. Now maybe it was the EDRAM here, but I really expected that the frame rate would tank when this happened, but nope, if anything it got better, yet there was no sign of draw distance reduction, etc.