Stopped reading when I realised I was lost.

Yes. It looks so good...

Hopefully this, and the upcoming Aqua Moto Racing Utopia, will help to ease WiiU's current lack of a proper F-Zero and Wave Race, respectively.

Likely to save space by repeating textures where the player will least notice; it's only noticeable because of the bird's eye view, from the track it won't be visible.

That's the main reason I'm excited for it, it's probably the closest I'll get to a modern F Zero.

Indeed. Somebody told me that the tiles are done through texture syntesis and that due to that reason he though that they werent using tesselation or dispalcement at least on the terain, but since the terrain has good bumps i decided to investigate a bit more on the technique and foud that tiles can be used on purpose to later apply tesselation

https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/...les/sdk/11/TerrainTessellation_WhitePaper.pdf
Seems like tiled texture can be used on purpose to later tesselate them
"
Mapping to the Tessellation
Pipeline
Figure 3 below shows how the technique maps onto the stages of the shader
pipeline. On the left are the various shader stages; on the right is an approximate
sketch of the status of one patch at the corresponding pipeline stages

Non-Uniform Patch Sizes
Motivation – Range of Scales
Terrain engines often support large world sizes (or level sizes in games). For
example, Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 uses levels that are an impressive 128x128km.
To render a world of this size and maintain a roughly constant triangle size in
screen-space requires a huge range of triangle sizes in world space. Triangles closest
to the view-point may be only a few centimeters wide; the most distant triangles may
be several kilometers across. Figure 8 below is typical – the foreground polygons
are smaller than footprints, say 5cm, but the distant polygons are maybe hundreds
of meters across. And the view distance in this image is fairly short.

DirectX 11 limits tessellation factors to the range 1 to 64. This is not nearly 
sufficient to represent the range of scales required for a large, detailed world. To 
continue the example above, the smallest polygons are 5cm. If they are 
implemented with the finest tessellation factor of 64, the largest polygon can only be 
64 x 5 = 320cm. Whereas terrain may require a range of scales like 5cm to 1km or 
20,000 to 1.
The solution is of course to employ patches of differing sizes. Terrain engines 
commonly implement LOD with tiles of differing sizes, for example (Ulrich, 2002). 
We apply this to our patch sizes, as shown in Figure 9. Our TileRing C++ class 
implements the varying size. (Ring is not an entirely accurate term – they are 
concentric squares.) Recall that a tile is 8x8 patches. Each successive TileRing
increases the tile size by 2x; the 2x scaling considerably simplifies the crack-free 
algorithm below.
"

That terrain deformation example kind of resebles the one on fast racing neo, and since the terrain may use tiles and doesnt look flat i think there is a good chance for it to be using tesselation. Seems that what shinen said was right, you cant just apply tesselation, you must think over how and when t use it

Why don't you ask them on twitter if they are using tesselation or displacement?

They're quite open as far as answering technical questions, usually.

Although sometimes asking helps, they often avoid direct answers to the questions, it would be easier to ask someone from certain game site to do the inquiry and just advise him which doubts we have and want to be answered

Looking at the images we can just make guesses, although their comment about the 1GB files per mesh would be impossible to fit it in the wii u RAM unless you make a very good compression, and a BC1 that has a maxium of 6x per texture would be not enough, thats why the best guess of what they did to the original meshes is tesselation

Could just be really good normal mapping. That would leave a lot more performance overhead for sustaining 60fps and running all the other effects they're doing.

possibly, although the terrain and the mountains look very well detailed for normal mapping,and also normal mapping has no occlusion and geometry is faked by light which is very noticeable in objects taht are parallel to our view, from what i see in the mountains the geometry looks real and not a fake