Eurogamer: You talked a little bit about how the process of designing for 360 has been different this time. I think a lot of people find that interesting - that idea of developers getting better with hardware. Could you talk more about how that actually manifests itself?
Gareth Wilson: With PGR3, we did a lot of - I guess you could call it brute-force development, because we were like "this machine is ten times more powerful at this particular thing, so to get the fidelity we will just do 120,000 polygons". So you do it and it looks great, but when you've released it, you look back and you go "did we really need that many polygons? Actually, couldn't we just do a shader that would replicate that look and halve the polygon count?" That means that you can get the same look in a more efficient way, and if you apply that across the whole of the game, you're saving a fraction of a frame here, there and everywhere.
Reflections on the bonnet are a perfect example of that. In PGR3, we took the whole of the world, rendered it onto the car, and that took a huge amount of work - the cube-mapping. This time around - I don't know if you've seen the bonnet-cam, but the reflections are absolutely perfect. The cars are rendered in it, which they weren't in PGR3; the crowd are rendered into the reflection, which they weren't in PGR3, and it's just because the programmer was looking at it and he went "you know what? I could just do it this way and it would be fine." Because of a particular way the architecture works - I won't get technical - but it stores the last frame in a memory buffer - that's how the graphic engine works - and if we just take that frame and put it on the car, then we don't have to do the obscene amount of work we were doing before. That frees up more CPU to do the weather effects and stuff.
Eurogamer: It's all about being able to take stock.
Gareth Wilson: It is, and there's all sorts of things like that all over the game. And there'll be more to do. Although you can exploit the 360 power quicker than the PS3, without a doubt, there's still more to go on a 360. The next game we do no doubt will look better than PGR4 does.
