Doubt that, in a car mag, forgot the name of it but they said PD upped their hadrware to render those back grounds and they have a new rendering engine, I seroius doubt they got a whole new and pwerful rendering engine just for some photo matching.
There have also been articles about them Taking thousands of photos. they may have computers powerfull enough to render that image but The PS2 simplys is not capable of rendering that background.
They do however employ a whole new graphics engine which is leaps ahead of GT3 and allows them to overlay much higher detailed texture maps, which are of touched up and linked photographic images which have been re rendered to blend into the look of the game and still maintain real life quality, all this done with the new rendereing process engine you mention.
That statement is still very confusing, but essentailly it means that real life photos have been re-manipualted into high quality background textures(live4speed), then dispalyed through the new graphics engine (Cobragt) which allows much higher detail levels than for Gt3.
Result The high quality backgrounds you see here.
P.S Cobragt I have now seen the Crowd scene video, And the crowd are no where near as detailed as the shots you showed with the focus (surely you must agree on that), and that leads even more weight to the theory that they are part of a rendered video which is highlighting new features of the game, along with the part wireframed characters from the pit crew, of course we can expect to see these features in the game though the detail level will be significantly below the images you posted.
The crowd scene was very impressive and more highly populated than i though would be the case, but obviouslly this is in the rally mode where one/two cars are the max so the game engine has more available power for these extra nuances.
though i am a really big gm fan it would have been fun to boot around in.
