It's pretty much a standard to laser scan tracks and terrain for most games.
I think the problem here is a lot of you don't grasp some major concepts that go on behind the "smoke and mirrors".
A)The current engine is pushing the current resources of this mini pc from 2005~(?) to the limit. It's quite great for what it was back then, but now deprecated. At that time I was playing GTR2 on the PC, now I play Assetto and GT6; which is miles ahead. Especially the rendering and the "mesh" of both track and cars. Easiest way to define this is look at the '99 Viper GTS and compare it to a later model. Now think of what hardware advances they have made since this thing came out. Since then I have upgraded my processor and video card 3 times and that was every few generation releases. PC graphics on both the production (engineering graphics like AutoCAD, 3DS Max, Inventor, etc) and gaming side of things have made immense leaps and bounds in technology since then alone.
B) Now I've done some game modding and seen what the "mesh" looks like for these tracks (PC) and its not much of a different concept for GT judging from the behind the scenes videos (Nurburgring had almost a million vertices in GTR2, so imagine our track in GT6...and it's exceptionally smoother).
C)What is laser scanning? How many of you actually know what it really does and what the product is from it. I'm willing to bet not more than 5% out there. Not saying you're dumb for not knowing, if you're not in the industry or in a related field of work or study, you don't have a true grasp (it's magic, j/k). Laser scanning gives you a point cloud (no nothing to do with the internet cloud, a bunch of points in space where the laser gave back positional data linked with GPS and survey data). See you can use a high resolution of these points which gives you life like details, but it requires a lot of horsepower to represent the physics and model rendering. So the tracks we have are more than likely at some point dumbed down for performance reasons.
D)What a lot of people don't realize what was explained back in GT5 in a behind the scenes video, that they "incorporated" controller support...another fancy marketing way of saying they dumbed down the physics so a broad spectrum of their customer base could still play the game. This inherently "modified" realistic physics. Think about it, you can't drive a real car with a controller with smootheness and accuracy. Take for instance the RC car concept of driving. You can get close but not quite there. If you need further proof watch racing of both a controller and wheel and you will see the person with a controller pulling unrealistic turns at full wheel pitch. If you drive a car in real life you will know how true this is. It also helps if you played some actual legit racing Sims like iRacing, Assetto Corsa, rFactor, or GTR series. I saw this with a couple PC games where they initially had only wheel support and later added controller support.
E)To address what some one said earlier about dynamic track physics, ACorsa has settings where you can start with a fresh track and progressively put down rubber with each lap or start with a nicely rubbered track. It makes for you wanting multiple laps on a 30 minute enduro at Nurburgring.
I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea...I love the GT series and like any game they have either fallacies or they are ones interpretation of the real thing. With each release I can see how much closer we're getting, but keep in mind we are extremely limited with the PS3 hardware. I actually wish that GT6 was made for the PS4 and we were stuck with GT5 a bit longer with some cool DLC that made GT6 cool. Or a major update at least. But $$ talks and BS walks...hence we had to buy another game not quite done and limited by the hardware.
Blame it on the battle of "realism vs marketting department". Now that's how the real world works.
First one with the TLDR remark gets the "dolt" award for not being a little enlightened.
