The preview was based on an older build of the game and several of its observations are unfortunately either wrong or due to bugs or items which have subsequently been addressed by the development team during the finaling process. Notably:

- The level of Anisotropic filtering was increased from 4x to 8x on both consoles, significantly improving the general image quality and sharpness of the road.
- Both consoles are set to use motion-blur at the equivalent of the PC medium setting – the differences seen on PS4 were due to bugs which were transient with on-going optimisation and not because PS4 uses object based motion-blur.
- The shadow differences highlighted were largely down to the various slope-scale DX11 issues we had at this time - many WMD users had reported these on PC builds and we were able to fix these bugs to more closely align the shadow rendering across platforms.
- The build reviewed was also lacking some significant "render bridge" camera work, which significantly improved frame pacing and the general feeling of smoothness especially when cornering.

In the article it is mentioned that Project Cars on Xbox One is using post-process anti-aliasing which is equivalent to the PC's higher FXAA settings. This is incorrect, the Xbox One version uses MSAA, or more precisely AMD's EQAA (Enhanced Quality Anti Aliasing) with 8 fragments and 4 samples, which is equivalent to MSAA 4x on PC.

Just to add to our previous comments:

- In the older build that was analysed it was possible to become CPU bound with very high numbers of AI, maxing out all 6 cores on XBox One. However, Microsoft had recently opened up 50% of the 7th core to developers : in later builds the development team was able to offload work such as the audio mixing, engine sound synthesis and detailed grass generation onto this core, fixing this problem of becoming CPU limited.
- Tracks that had water elements (sea/lakes etc) in the analysed build used an expensive cube-map method for reflections leading to inconsistent frame rate. In late March this was addressed with us switching over to use a screen space reflections method - A WMD community member did some comparison benchmarks on PC when this new technique was introduced:

"B967/B968

Azure Coast 62.5 fps/82 fps +31%
Azure Circuit 61.5 fps/ 73 fps +19%
Laguna Seca 55 fps/76 fps +38%
Sakitto GP 61.5 fps/86.5 fps +41%
Nürburgring GP 57.5 fps/76.5 fps +33%

Looks identical visually, big improvement."

The relative scaling there applied equally to the console versions.
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If you incorporate our above corrections to the article, these points and some more general optimisations that have subsequently been worked on, it's easy to see why we might feel this review isn't very representative of what the development team has achieved.

Diluted Dante wrote:

No they shouldn't. They were provided something the PR described as 'submission quality'. They did their thing on that basis. Everything they said is true of it, they say they don't know if it's what can be expected at launch, and things can change.

It's not their fault that Namco are inept.

We'd like to apologise to our readers and to Slightly Mad Studios for this unintentional misrepresentation.