Did I? Or did you just make up a scenario that doesn't exist?

"In fact, nowadays, everything is built on such a high level abstraction layers for ease of porting that I'd wonder how many people even can reliable do this level of under the hood work.

There aren't many developers in the gaming industry that go to or know this level of programming, and they easily rival some of the best in EPD/EAD (or MonolithSoft) when it comes to breaking a system open for the last oodles of power."

From what I can tell, I didn't underestimate anyone. I made only a comparison between Shin'en and EAD/EPD (Monolith) and said that not many people go to this level of coding or programming (fewer having any realiable knowledge of it). My statement was part supposition ("I wonder"), part fact about abstraction layer and high level API dev work, and part giving them credit as being some of the best in the field. None of this says anything about who or how good the rest of the field is, just that they are relatively very good.

Shin'en are some seriously talented programmers. 

FRN may be the game that's finally gotten them noticed, but they've been squeezing impressive performance out of Nintendo hardware since the GBA.

Hell, the first FAST Racing managed to look this good (sans resolution) while fitting into the 40MB limit of Wiiware:

LOL Man......"If you can get beyond the lower resolution". It's a great game. It looks great. A higher resolution would surely make it look crisper...but how much of a graphics whore does someone have to be, to be bothered by a lower resolution?

Then again, it IS Digital Foundry.

Well yeah, the whole point of Digital Foundry is technical analysis, so they'd be remiss if they didn't point out the image quality tradeoffs. 

One of the best indie games of 2015

Wow...I'm almost hesitant to believe that's even a Wii game.

All hail Shin'en. xD

Well, the actual game is 480p of course (I couldn't find a good native res screen) but other than that, yeah, it's very impressive for the hardware:

Looks good, but also shows that the jump in graphics they made with FRN is insane. 

There is an important update from Digital Foundry, the game is not 640x720p

UPDATE 14/12/15 5:20pm: After spending more time with the game, we wanted to clarify the issue of rendering resolution in Fast Racing Neo. While results as low as 640x720 are possible, and evident in many of our examples, it doesn't tell the whole story. The game operates at 1280x720 with a re-projection technique not completely unlike that of Killzone Shadow Fall's multiplayer mode.

Here, though, the re-projection technique is most effective on edges composed against areas with proper depth buffer information. As the skybox used in the game lacks any z-buffer entries, polygon edges contrasted against this area of the screen cannot be effectively reconstructed. It is this type of scenario that produces lower resolution results evident in some of the screen captures.

Basically, the apparent resolution of an edge depends on where it falls within the image. Edges of geometry placed against other objects within the world can actually appear to operate with a width of 1280. Yet, when contrasted against the skybox, these edges lose information and instead appear to operate with half the pixels. The end result is sharper image quality than 640x720 could allow but not quite as clean as a native 1280x720 either. It's good middle ground for the game that makes the smooth frame-rate possible.

Outside of the rather lackluster image quality (i could cut my hand on some of those jaggies :p), FRN looks genuinely exceptional for a WiiU game. Especially considering the size of the team that made it. A 1080p version really wouldn't look out of place on either the PS4 or X1.

Looking at what WipEout HD did on the PS3, and what FRN is doing on the WiiU, i really hope we see a new WipEout entry on the PS4 at some point. Would be interesting to see what kind of stuff they could do.