Hopefully this info isn't too redundant. Stole it from a forum that stole it from another forum.
*As for multi-core optimization, the session mainly discussed methods for symmetric multi-core (Xbox 360). Since parallelization per module or loop which are often seen in parallel programming is not suitable for a game engine, parallelization per task including player character, enemy, bullet, camera, effect generator etc. is mainly used in the engine.
*To suppress parallelization bugs such as dead lock, they made 2 clearly separated rules called "parallel update" which has no dependency and "synchronized update" in which each task can refer to and update other tasks. Task relationships and synchronization update intervals are adjustable on a GUI tool to make it easy to find parallel processes against the rules.
*The performance for 1 thread vs 6 threads is, 2.6x in Dead Rising, and 2.15x in Lost Planet (under development). The CPU load is 80% for the main thread, 70% for rendering and sound, and 50-60% for other parallelized tasks.
*There were only a few parallelization-related bugs against the rules in thousands of bug reports in the bug-checking period of the Dead Rising development, which shows totally parallelized application doesn't necessarily equal a bug-hell and they can realize stable parallelization thanks to the parallelization techniques and the strict rules in the Framework engine.
*As for hi-def graphics, they pointed out "frame rate, fill rate, texture quality and size are more problematic than shader." Because of their estimation that 60fps is impossible for next-gen-esque imagery, they added lightweight 2.5D motion blur to make 30fps look smoother. Besides MSAA mini buffer is used in effect drawing to gain more fill rate (with the premise that GPU can use MSAA mini-buffer without cost). For better texture compression, they do original texture compression which appropriates an alpha channel for an extended information area and decompress it with programmable shaders.