What information am I stating that's incorrect?
We could start here:
Have you seen a PS1 game in HD? Doesn't do them any favors.
I've played GT2 at 1080p. It looked sharper, sure, but there was no additional detail being made apparent by the increased resolution.
All along that thing on the door that said "FDHGSDFHSA" and "FGDFHS" actually said "MAZDASPEED" and "Castrol"
ASGSWERWHSFD
GDSFHGSDFH
or
INTERSTATE
BATTERIES
And NFL.
And Wards.
And MBNA.
Those are both just upping the internal resolution. No faked hi-res texture filtering.
Then we can move onto this:
SD was sufficient for the level of detail on display.
SD maybe
was sufficient for the level of detail on display, but PSX games very rarely actually ran at SD. Even before the PS2 launched, Bleemcast! showed how much better the handful of games that were officially shown for it looked at a higher resolution with texture smoothing. That was pretty much half the selling point, since it did a much better job at improving PSX titles' graphically than the PS2 did with its smoothing option that seemed to essentially be applying bilinear filtering on the game at the same resolution it originally had.
And here:
But then you take a PS2 game like Final Fantasy XII, and all of a sudden you're seeing intricate details of things in HD that were previously only indistinct blobs of pixels in SD.
You mean like the logo textures obscured into big bags of random pixels above? PD and EA and Codemasters and Namco put an awful lot of detail into their textures and models for late generation PSX games that still all ran at 240p through S-Video at best.
How many Standard cars have details in GT5 that you couldn't see in GT4 Photo Travel, by the way? How will they benefit even more in a PS4 game, when the graphical standards will be even higher than they were when the Standards arrived on the scene 5 years ago but the actual resolution of the game will be only slightly higher?
Going back to this one:
So it's pretty obvious why they chose not to carry assets over from the PS1 era.
GT1 and GT2 cars ported to GT3, on the GT3 game engine (with it's lighting and effects and higher resolution), still would have looked quite a bit better than almost any PS2 racing game released up to that point. The examples above are just a hackish resolution scale on a PSX emulator, and already the cars have more details visible than if they were played on a PSX/PS2/PS3. If those cars were actually running on a game engine designed for a higher resolution on a system more powerful than the PSX, they would look better still. That's also assuming that the PSX assets as they appeared in the game were the maximum quality that they had been designed at. And still the only PS2 game I can think of that would have been
definitely better looking than a GT3 loaded up with GT2 assets would have been Xtreme Racer Zero, which barely counts because it was port of a game originally designed for the Dreamcast.
In fact, that's essentially what GT2000
was (nevermind all of the early PS2 titles that actually released in that state, like RC Revenge Pro), if you look closely at the screenshots and videos of the cars in it (albeit looking like it switched to normal texture rendering instead of the sprite hybrid thing GT1/GT2 used); and that was basically treated like some sort of graphics messiah all the way up to when it was dropped and GT3 proper was announced. So clearly the option was on the table, and had they gone through with it the results wouldn't have been as extreme as they were with the PS2 -> PS3 jump.
So where's the part about the later years PSX graphical assets being unsuitable for usage in future generations that is so obvious? If it's so obvious why PSX assets PD made never survived past the PSX, why does the logic also not apply to the PS2-quality Standard cars that are even further away graphically at this point than the PSX ones at their equivalent time? Because the simple fact that they didn't do it then but seem to want to do it in perpetuity now isn't really proof of anything other than PD's changing priorities.
I'm not moving goalposts.
Yes you are. You're bringing up games that were
released in 1997/1999, using graphical assets that were fairly close to top of the heap
at the time they released, as a comparison point to a theoretical game being released in the next couple years over a decade and a half after some of the graphical assets in it were designed. Kaz has no reason to be embarrassed by the games he made that were released in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2004 because they
were all top of the heap, graphically elite titles that perfectly matched all of the statements that he made about them being so graphically elite compared to their contemporaries.
GT5 wasn't, but was constantly paraded around as if it was. GT6 wasn't. GT7, if it includes Standard cars by any measure other than maybe "They are all Premiums except they don't have interiors", won't be. But Kaz will most certainly talk about the game as if it is anyway.
