Introduction

When I reviewed Gran Turismo 3 for FiringSquad, I said that I couldn’t remember the last time I had ever had so much fun playing a game. I called it the first killer-app for the PlayStation 2 and awarded it the coveted FiringSquad Editor’s Choice and a rare 96% score, the highest score I had ever given to a product at the time. Four years later, we have Gran Turismo 4.

We imported Gran Turismo 4 at the beginning of January from NCSX (where incidentally we’ve imported every other Gran Turismo game for the PS2). While our game was in transit, a startling rumor began to pop up on message boards: GT4 supported HDTV resolutions. No one believed the rumors at first – Sony had never mentioned it before, and with only 4MB of eDRAM in the PlayStation 2, the framebuffer would need at least 3MB, leaving no room for textures. Polyphony Digital would have to be using some magic streaming voodoo technology to copy data into memory and delete it as soon as it was used to make room for the next bit of data.

All the Gran Turismo games on my bookcase

Box Art and the two Japanese-only Reference Books

The US art for Gran Turismo 3 is the worst of the bunch

Calsonic makes the remote control for my Maxima. It has incredible range.

Pick your favorite car

Stealth

Lotus Elise on the Nurburgring

Honda’s HSC Concept may very well become the next NSX

Bridges really do look that sharp in HDTV mode

Well, the rumor is true, GT4 will run at HDTV 1080i resolutions in single player mode (or LAN play) with a notable improvement in image quality. For once, the high resolution, anti-aliased images produced by Sony’s development PS2 systems is close to what the end user can really achieve. Thus, we’ve gone with the USB 1280x960 images from the photo mode for our screenshots. Some of these shots look stunning, and your first question will be to ask if the game really looks like that in real-time.

Pretty much.

Vehicle dynamics in the air could be better

Paris at Night

GT4 still has dozens of Skyline GT-R’s to choose from

The SC430 (aka. Toyota Soarer)

Notice the realistic suspension modeling

Anyone else like the new 2005 Mustang GT?

Graphics

The motion blur and depth-of-field effects are significantly worse in-game, and so we’ve minimized the number of shots using this feature, but with an HDTV, the geometry and anti-aliased look to the game is there. The cars in these still shots look just as good in-game.

It’s honest HDTV gaming. There’s no slowdown at 60 fps. With a regular non-high-definition TV, the graphics are still better than the images from Gran Turismo 3, although they continue to be similar. The pre-calculated lighting and textures look better, but the big difference is that there’s a superb flicker filter that removes a lot of the shimmer associated with PS2 games. Suffice it to say that GT4 on a HDTV looks closer to the photo mode shots than it does to images captured with a standard video capture card, and GT4 on a regular TV is still the best looking PS2 game to date and even looks like a great modern PC game. It’s an amazing demonstration of pre-GeForce 256 DDR technology. For unclear reasons though, the menus are not in HD resolutions. This is a problem for those of you with 4:3 HDTVs that reset aspect ratios when the source resolution changes.

A favorite mod for a Lexus SC300 is to add a Twin Turbo from the Supra

The S2000 isn’t particularly exclusive, but it is a great car to drive

American Muscle

What is that in the rear?

The 2005 Mustang GT!

Awesome cars… not so awesome billboard textures

In the interest of time, we’re going to assume that you’re familiar with Gran Turismo 3 and we’ll gear this article as comparison between GT3 and GT4. In addition, the only way to play GT4 is with the force feedback steering wheel – the gamepad is just for navigating menus. We’ll return with a formal GT4 article including gamepad discussion once the US version is released.