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The finishing line is in sight. Only a day remains until Project Cars becomes a finished article on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, an accomplished racer with beautifully detailed cars, plus an impressive real-time weather dynamic. There's a sense Slightly Mad Studios is pushing each platform as hard as it can while still angling for 60fps, though to cut to the chase, neither PS4 or Xbox One gets a perfect lock on this figure. But given its suite of options, which race setups give us the best frame-rate, and where is the engine at its most fragile? With the final retail release to hand, Project Cars' initial install weighs in at around 19.5GB for each console. In its default state, this precisely matches the size of the build tested in our original hands-on- though a day one 817MB patch on PS4 increases its HDD profile, and bumps the version number up to 1.01. A smaller 482MB update is also required on Xbox One, and it's impossible to play anything besides one track in solo mode until the update is finished on either platform.
We intend to look into Project Cars visuals in greater depth with the upcoming Face-Off, but certain points bear mention right now. Firstly, Xbox One still retains a curious advantage in texture filtering, where static screens show PS4's roads blurring over at a closer proximity. Added to that we also see the same motion blur effect on PS4 as before, with moving objects producing an unusual banding behind them - while Xbox One's blur is more refined (UPDATE 6/5/15 8:16pm: Slightly Mad says that the PS4 artifact is an additional temporal component to its anti-aliasing). Even on update 1.01, these are two areas that remain unchanged from when we last saw Project Cars in action, and similarly, PlayStation 4 retains a quality advantage in its rendering of shadows.
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