Graphical gorgeousness
You’d expect with all those cars belting about that the game engine would need some fairly meaty grunt inside your PC to push it along at a respectable frame rate, but you’d be wrong.
Graphically, running on my 1700XP o/c’d to 2400 with a stock ATI Radeon 9800XT with the latest Cats, Sunrise runs as smooth as greased polecat on an ice rink. The only time that there is a slight stutter is when the blurring effect kicks in and I get a momentary pause, but otherwise, as the screen shots show, this is one good looking game.
I know, compared to NFS:U2 it lacks the complex backdrops, but what it has in there it does very well. Close up the textures don’t look blocky or blurred, though there is a tiling effect when you pan out with the customisable camera.
Even with 20 or so cars on the track, Sunrise still keeps things moving nice and fast and the graphics come to the fore when you get auto-switched into certain views at key points in some races. The reason for the compulsory switched view is two fold… first, it is a gameplay thing as the view can either deliberately help you or hinder you and secondly, it gives Nadeo a chance to show of just how stupidly unreal it is to drive a car at over 500 kph up a huge concrete half-pipe, do a 180 in mid air and then land it on another half pipe before tearing off down the road… Unreal and impossible, but fun all the same.
