Supposedly the full version will have FF tuning.TOCA is less focused and covers more genres of racing -- in Toca 3 you can race GT, Indy, Nascar, Rally... monster truck, lawn mowers... hehe. There are quite a few courses and car types, and a substantial difference in Toca 3 is damage modelling: you can totally tear wheels off, doors off, etc and the damage to your car impacts how the car handles and the performance in a much more realistic way than Forza. Yet on the other hand Toca 3's driving model is more floaty, and generic, than FM1 so I wouldn't expect that to change considering the vast number of cars Codemasters has to account for. Another difference is Toca 3 supports up to 12 human players online and over 20 in races with AI, so I hope that doesn't change.

Toca and FM are both sims, but they are differently focused. There are bound to be comparisons in regards to graphics and driving model, but what they bring to the table as a sim is really different. I fully expect FM2 to drop kick Toca 4 into next decade in terms of driving model, but then again you won't be getting speed trucks and quad runners in FM2 anytime soon either.

Good to hear they are using their new graphics engine.

The CPU sends draw calls which is significantly streamlined on the consoles -- and it is obvious that the FM2 geometry isn't a significant load over other games on the market. Further, the consoles are significantly triangle setup limited on the GPU end (read all the horror stories about RSX, LOD, and passing vertexes with a limited number of states). And the 360 has 6 hardware threads--and a renderer being one of the easiest tasks to spinoff to a dedicated thread, hence the entire premise of a GPU to begin with--so unless you are suggesting the reason they cut huge amounts of features for the CPU... no. Perfect example: So you are suggesting they cut 3D grass for CPU overhead? Pretty lame because such objects should be properly instanced on the GPU, which requires no CPU overhead. Heck, Turn10 supposedly cut a entire tile from the renderer late in the process (last minute, right?) so that should have saved a boatload of CPU cycles.

As for memory bandwidth, the CPU is slave and GPU master in the 360 configuration and the CPU has far less memory resources available by design (less than half of the system bandwidth). System bandwidth is going to be a trivial issue compared to cache bandwidth for physics. Seeing as you see 20+ cars in a PC sim run great with 3.2GB/s of bandwidth if Turn10 ran into bandwidth issues due to simulation then their simulation design is very poor. Further, as graphics go, the GPU uses the system memory for textures of various sorts as well as geometry and the output buffer. The eDRAM is your complete scratchpad for all your major GPU memory utilization.

Anyhow, all strawmen. The history of the genre shows that good graphics are not limited by advanced simulation. It doesn't mean the game isn't CPU limited. But that also doesn't mean that the GPU needs to be underutilized. *Forza is already sending all the triangle data to the GPU. If the GPU is idling due to the CPU working they should be using more/longer shaders to keep the GPU busy*

But I think you and others are totally misunderstanding the depths of cuts Turn10 undertook. They effectively took out all their 3D grass and removed vegitation animation. The reduced their car count by 50% They significantly lowered their IQ levels and castrated their HDR system. They completely gutted their post processing pass.

With modern GPUs and gamedesign you have to balance your art direction with your technology choices and approaches. Not every approach with have the same quality results, and certain design mistakes can doom your game. And the task of multi-threading and writing complex SM3.0+ shaders and render systems isn't an easy task. Rendering cars is one of the easier things you can do, but there is a reason there is a disparity in the market between the upper eschelon of developers and the also rans. Like any task in life it takes skill to extract performance from a console. Some studios are better at it. There is a reason why companies like id, Epic, PD, and such are constantly turning out performant software that is full of cutting edge technology.Answered above.And of all people I would expect you to misunderstand this. As for a closed box comment you have it backwards. A closed box allows you to SPECIFICALLY work around such changes.

But the fact remains that being CPU intensive doesn't steal away GPU cycles. And not surprisingly software is often design limited, no resource. Even something like large matrix deformable meshes, like cloth, that have thousands of collisions lean heavily on cache accesses and not general memory. This is the reasons SPEs are so cool -- very, very fast, low latency local memory. The flops and system memory accesses are secondary -- and in the form of the later DETRIMENTAL to performance as system memory is very, very slow -- so it isn't a safe assumption at all to assume there are memory issues.

And even if the engine is saturing the CPU's memory (about 10GB/s) bandwidth, the GPU still has significant amounts of memory bandwidth. Just look at some of the midlevel GPUs on the market like the 7600GT (just take a CPU limited game on the PC and start cranking up the graphics and you will see you can do this for quite a while before you start impacting the framerate... hence the point of CPU limited, the GPU is idle BUT already recieving drawcalls, so it can happily being adding effects to the triangles instead of idling). It has paltry bandwidth but runs great at 1MP resolutions. So taking Xenos, offloading all the scratchpad and buffers to the eDRAM, and it is easy to see how Xenos still has significantly more system bandwidth.

This isn't to say Turn10 didn't run into these problems, but these would be indicative of design issues which a 1st party of an important flagship/AAA title shouldn't have. Devs aren't complaining about this stuff in general (actually memory bandwidth and triangles are 2 things devs love about the 360--tiling not so much, CPU limiting another but that isn't Forza's issue as it is 60fps, so they were able to work it out that they hit 60fps so -- as Turn10 themselves said -- they could then begin enabling graphic affects on top... which never happened... dare I say because they had a late Spring release deadline and spent most of their time trying to hit 60fps on the CPU end and never developed their GPU effects?)

Down the road it will become clear as more titles come out, and maybe even Forza 3, that the game isn't being limited graphically because it is a sim. If that is the case Forza 3 couldn't add any more to the graphics as they continue to improve the AI, physics, gameplay, etc.

Skill, resource, budget, and gambles/risks all go into the equation. Retrospectively I think it is easy to see graphics always took a 2nd seat for Turn10 -- hence the reason they didn't even turn them on for early PR shots. Why? They had not even developed them. Being 6 months late and stepping on the toes of late 2007's killer lineup MS effectively told them, "Time is up. Ship!" Hence the huge reduction in content (50% of courses!) and features.

It is what it is. And I cannot think of many examples that backup your performance theories but can play sims right now with many more cars that don't have the issues you suggest. Let alone some of the best technical racers on almost any platform have also looked great. The reason of course being that it is a result of developer skill and budget. There is something to be said about: Shipping when we are done. Period.