OK, I went back and tried it for a fair while whilst my wife was at the Trinny and Susannah thing.
I agree, frame rate was very choppy, and with 3D off at the TV I don't think the PS3 changes, so it seems that you are only getting every second frame and felt even more choppy.
3D is also half the horizontal resolution I believe, and some stuff looks pretty jaggy.
There was also noticable tearing and the weird reflection artifacts around the roof of the car that was there in Prologue is still there.
You can choose either a Time Trial or Arcade Race, all other options are not selectable.
If you go back to the main screen and leave it for a while I got to see the Aeroplane Hanger photo mode back drop, I can't remember, is it a red bull museum or something?
The trees in this section and generally everywhere are the 2D variety and in some situations such as the Hanger or Toscana track they look really out of place and well plain old bad.
The car AI didn't seem to be particularly improved and for the most part drove like I didn't exist. But having said that I am perfectly happy with the AI from GT3 on, GT2 they seem to be all over the track and to me that doesn't feel realistic. I'd much prefer they follow the racing line like drivers who know the track.
I managed some fairly brutal head ons, particularly with the Nascar's on the Rome track, and saw some fairly good looking realtime deformation happen to the lead AI car. I seemed to be unable to get other cars to deform though, even other Nascar's.
I also managed to drive a Nascar into the wall for a stretch and aside from lots of sparks the front bumper came loose.
In replays I could not see either sparks, deformation or the loose bumper.
The 3D effect felt better in the replays and some of the camera angles are spectacular.
Physics felt fantastic (although I loathe playing with the controller), and had that similar feel to the TT demo when I played on professional.
The engine sounds were very good imho especially the Nascars and the Corvette, far more like they are moving quantities of air like real V8's.
Tyre squeal sounded like the TT demo to me.
Tyre smoke is spectacular, except when reversing in the bumper view as smoke seems to just appear at two points in the middle of the screen which looks weird.
I was unable to produce any tyre marks, although the guy at the stand believed that he saw a car literally drive over another car and leave either tyre tracks or damage on the roof of the other car. Despite trying very hard I was unable to reproduce this.
On the Toscana track I drove to the top of the hill and sat looking at the sun, the blonde at the stand came over and said are you having trouble and I said no, I'm watching the sunset, she looked at me funny and then watched the screen and commented "wow that looks pretty cool"... that's one of those weird video gaming moments that I could really only retell on this forum
The sunset was pretty quick and once the lights of the car come on it was too dark to see much in the overly bright shopping centre lights, I'm hoping this is better at home.
I saw the game engine fail to load the road exture for the start of the track at the Ring and then later at the Tokyo track I saw all the textures slowly load starting from the viepoint and gradually into the distance. I have a theory that unlike previous GT's it is now streaming textures similar to the Unreal Engine. This has its pros and cons.
I looked at the file size of the demo and it was something like 3096MB, so my gut feeling is that the majority of the 10GB install will be the textures that are streamed in.
The ingame XMB was not available, with it only presenting you the option to quit the game or turn off the controller etc.
The guy at the stand said it crashed a lot, but I only saw it hang once after the screen goes black after the time limit on the Toscana track. That was when I got to check the size and the date on the demo file was 11 October 2010, but that may be the date it was downloaded and installed.
Overall if this is what you got to review GT5 and hadn't read anything else here or seen any trailers I think you would be very disappointed. So I think the average punter walking past and picking up the controller wouldn't get too excited about a new GT.
I on the other hand having driven it at Gamescom with a wheel I am insanely excited about the new physics engine, day / night and weather.
Just think, you could potentially drive a new car and a new track from the track creator every day for the next three years without seeing a repeat.
