1080i in disguise?

I've come to a rather strange conclusion after testing two wheels and playing quite a decent amount of Gran Turismo 4. The game has fantastic elements to it - driving physics, models, and in general great depth. But the graphics engine has managed to give me the kind of paper cut that doesn’t stop bleeding. It's minor enough not to warrant alarm, but annoying enough to babble about.

A resolution as high as 1080i is a feat regardless of platform, be it console or PC. Running any game at 1920x1080 pushes video cards to their limits and then some. The newer GeForce 6800s and Radeon X800s manage to get up that high, but even then the frame rates aren’t all that great. When you tell me that the Playstation 2 outputs 1080i with Gran Turismo 4, that's going to start raising alarm bells. To date there have been oh… no games that do 1080i on the Playstation 2. Even the Xbox only has a handful of very badly implemented games in full high-definition glory.

While playing Gran Turismo 4, I noticed that the player's point of view is in great focus. The objects near your car look fantastic. But when you move that line of sight a few feet out, everything gets super blurry. We aren't talking speed effects; this is from a stand still. The first time I noticed this was during a replay. Three bleary looking cars passed by. Then mine rolled into view; suddenly the game was crisp again. It was seriously like putting on a new pair of glasses. I instantly went from 20/4000 to 20/20. This graphical anomaly varied from track to track, and we haven’t had time to thoroughly investigate it.

The things I've seen could be nothing more than a graphical effect done by the team at Polyphony Digital. It's obvious they've done a lot of tweaking to get this game to run at a resolution as high as 1080i. Textures in the scenery are nowhere near as clear as those found on the cars. Regardless, I see jaggies that simply shouldn’t be there. Even without anti-aliasing, at high definition, jaggies should be minimized greatly. I haven’t had the time to verify for certain, but from a quick run through on our 720p capable TV, the 480p and 1080i versions suffer from a ridiculous amount of graphical artifacts. Lines should not be crawling anywhere near this much. After years of staring at monitors and TVs, confusing 842x480 with 1920x1080 would be downright shameful. Even though our TV isn’t capable of full 1080i, 720p is still an enormous step up from 480p.

I'm going to test Gran Turismo 4 out at home using my 1080i capable HDTV. I'm fairly certain that my results will be along the lines of what I've witnessed in the office. But there's always room for error, maybe I just need to get some sleep and open my eyes a bit wider in a few days.