After playing NFS Shift 2 round a mates other day and not being overly impressed, I decided to take the plunge (he wanted a friend to play online with.... bless), after 4 hours I changed my views, which doesnt happen that often... and here's why.
Ok so... NFS SHIFT 2 is sadly Dx9 graphics, and when maxed out it looks less polished than GRID, although to be fair, some of the locations do contain high amounts of backdrops eye candy that look very nice, although the humans are very badly textured and animated on the pre-race parts, damn shame that the track dollys are laughably poor grade as are little things like the smoke fx. I can't help feeling the video replays have added extra post processing compared to in game racing (such as track debris being very defined and more visible along with the grass) and I did notice the night events take huge performance hits (Fraps when not recording showing a drop of about 20+ fps).
Admittedly after running on my rig it came clear that some of the graphical issues were driver based, as seems likely coding or drivers to see scores using AA drop badly on just the night races even using Anamorphic and low end 2xAA, which suffered the same framerate penalty as 12xAA edge detect, so maybe the next official 11.4 update will sort that out, trying the newly updated build (23rd march) 11.4 previews today so fingers crossed.
I still maintain that the early game is behind GRID, but that could well be attributed to fact the game has a more comprehensive upgrade system for the cars where as in GRID, the performance bits are already maxed to race performance and Shift2 requires a car to be fully upgraded to reach the same handling... or so I hope, so far still working with a 3/4 upgraded Ford Focus and BMW M3, so can't expect much yet..lol
In a full U-Turn (sic) I now say this a decent game although it's still short of brilliant due to not being Dx10/11 quality, some handling issues, and several annoying niggles that hopefully will get tyre-ironed out a few patches down the line, although I feel TOCA Race Driver 3 and GRID are two games for under a fiver each that can still give this title a run for the money.