The issue with particles most likely won't ever be fixed in GT5.
In layman's terms... The same issue was also present on GT5 Prologue (for puffs of tyre smoke). The main difference being that:-
* In GT5, we have much more 'rain' / water spray / dirt / snow than there is tyre smoke in GT5P - this means having much larger particle buffers (or scaling them up before applying them) as there is more space to fill.
* The particle buffer in GT5P may be at a higher resolution than in GT5 (i.e. more RAM was available for this task). In GT4, the overall screen resolution was smaller, thus jagged effects were reduced relative to the main display buffer.
- Higher rez buffer means more "steps" where it appears jaggy (depending on buffer resolution compared to actual game buffer resolution 1024x1080), but equally it is more to draw which may result in more tearing / frame drops.
- The outline around the car (sometimes overlays the car) is necessary to save from rendering particles behind the car = less pixels to draw. The more pixels you draw the more chance you have of missing your 1/60th of a second to draw in = tearing and frame drops. Net side effect is that you also don't see particles rendered through car windows.
Possible ways to work around this? Could be worth PD's time to try / test...
(1) Use multiple particle buffers to draw 'puffs of particles' as opposed to 1 large particle buffer / effect. 'Middle' tiles could be solid / filled and may save time being separately plotted 'as particles' (depends how the effect is generated in the first place). Allocate SPE time to drawing tiled buffers around the cars in the scene. The particle effects in game would end up looking rather different to how they do now (could look better / worse). Possible issues: (a) Time to tile & repeat draw 'n' buffers may take longer than the existing effect resulting in more tearing / frame drops. (b) Effect may not look as good as current. (c) Effect of rear lights / headlights on particles may be spoiled (e.g. square blocks of red / yellow light).
(2) Drop "inconsequential" features like 'head tracking', '4xMSAA', (anything else you can think of - suggestions!?) - in favour of freeing CPU + RAM and having a higher resolution particle buffer. Possible issues: (a) Time to fill / draw higher resolution buffers may mean more 'pixel drawing' resulting in more tearing / frame drops. (b) Game may be worse (or look worse) depending on what is dropped. (c) I don't think Kazunori Yamauchi will go with the idea of dropping features.
(3) Modify the particle effects into alternating rasters, effectively the same interlacing effect used for ghost vehicles (i.e. drawing every other line) to reduce the amount of drawing that takes place. Jaggies may then only effectively appear to be only 'half as jaggy'. Issues: (a) Weather effects may look worse - or indeed may look better - dirt / spray / etc would appear more "transparent" as a side effect - though still quite clearly rastered. (b) Might save some draw time (fewer dropped frames in weather intensive scenes). I'd estimate this would be the fastest and easiest change to implement / test.
Can't think of anything else off the top of my head. It's not an easy problem to solve nor workaround.
Here's a nice screenshot just to remind us of the problem in all of it's glory...
So maybe if the particle alpha effect was only on alternating lines (i.e. smoke, etc were half transparent / half present) the smoke / dirt / spray might still look OK - but halving the blocky / jaggy effect may look better overall. Only be able to say after actually trying it out...
), but it's not the same as it being fixed because now you can't drive in full wet tracks or with changeable weather unless you want to see the aliasing creep back in as the rain builds up. I have heard people say they've improved it slightly though, so it'll be interesting to see some new screens, but someone else suggested this is a placebo effect based on the time of day you drive in (etc) and that doesn't sound like an unreasonable explanation either. I can live with it personally, even though I think PD are completely insane with leaving it in like that when they could have gone the less is more route.
