... where rendering is happening a lot with lots of characters, whats to render in GP4, a bunch of cars where only the wheels and a few other things actually move.Well, thats not quite the whole story. GP4 has to have an open space ready for rendering, thats about 3 x 1,5 kilometers. Thats 4,5 square kilometers of rendering (if it really isn't more) without loading at all during play! Most GFX engine cannot do this at all, nor even come close. 3dshooters solve this problem by narrowly defining where you can go, in a linear gameplay and movement restrictions, and by dividing the levels up into small sections that are loaded as needed. If you look at one of the closest attempts at what GP4 is trying to do, made in 3dshooter, that would be the forest map in UT2003. And with medium detail, I get about the same framerate on this map, as I do in GP4.
And really, there are more than 22 moving 3d objects. Every car can (and sometime does) split into little pieces. And then you have the marshalls running from their posts to the track, and 11 pit crews consisting of several engineers. None of this can be loaded during the game. Everything has to be stored in memory before the race starts. And most objects are, contrary to GP3, now in 3d, even though they are static.
The Q3 GFX engine couldn't do what GP4 does. UT2003 is on track, but it certainly isn't lavish in its fps either. Serious Sam (and its sequel) or Hitman 2, is probably the most generous shooter in recent months, when it comes to wide open spaces and many 3d objects. And none of them portray movement in the range of 100+ kph, nor do they need complex CPU demanding physics.
Thats not to say, that I think that the GFX engine for GP4 is generous in the fps department, far from that, but most people don't realize how hard it is to have such a vast area ready for rendering, and how many objects there actually is in the game, and how sheer speed of movement affects a games performance. The best thing to invoke is certainly not 3dshooters. Far better would be flight sims, since their specialty is the same as GP4's: Good GFX with lots of damagable objects that move in high speeds, while they obey complex CPU demanding physics, in wide open spaces.
Anyway, a lot of people have studied tinkering with the F1graphics.cfg file, and vastly increased their performance. If you need more ommph, I am sure that if you ask in a new topic and remember to post your specs, people will be more than happy to hand out a few pointers.
It's only after we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything.