The graphic engine of Downforce is a very welcome surprise for me. It's solid, fast, locked at a nearly constant 60fps, free of any pop-up issue and able to render magnificent real time crash sequences.
In fact, the crash sequences are probably the best thing in the whole game. According to the position, angle, and speed in the moment of the crash you'll see the cars destroying in a different way. I've played the game for hours, and I've yet to see two crashes that looked really identical. The vehicles in the game seem to be built with a very high number of breakable parts, and the result is always spectacular, even better than seeing spaceships exploding in the deep space in a Starfighter game.
The environments look huge, filled with average lighting and shadow effects, but they are not very detailed. Since the races take all place on street courses and not on circuits, in Downforce you'll visit Honk Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Florida, Las Vegas, Toronto, Sydney, Geneva, and the architectures, the style and even the colors of these places have been recreated with care. On my opinion, it's much better than racing on the usual circuits of F1 games.
Unfortunately, the quality of the textures is most of the times low or in the average, and complex objects like trees seem still in the PsOne era. In certain tracks, like Sydney, also the buildings are way too simplified for a game running on the Playstation 2. Finally, while the game is free of any pop-issue - and that's a good result, considering the vastness of the environments rendered on the screen - aliasing problems can become evident, even if the speed of the graphic engine will prevent most players from noticing them.
