Shadow occlusion, ambient occlusion, some post processing effects etc. will surely bump up the visuals of rF2 when they arrive, but I doubt it'll look as good as pCARS, and considering pCARS has probably as many guys in the art department as ISI has total employees, I wouldn't expect otherwise.
have you got pCar alpha build? its nowhere near as good as those Rendered shots
DON'T GET ME WRONG. I'm sure with using DX (not sure why ISI didn't?) it will loook awesome when finished....just not sure whether it will be arcade, sim or somewhere in between?
It's good that you already took back what you said, because those shots aren't rendered, they're user submitted pics from the alpha. Sure, they've bumped up the graphics to where only the heaviest caliber machines can run the game, and are using external FXAA injectors (the AA in pCARS seems to suffer from some of the same problems rF2 suffers), and they spend a lot of time tweaking the lighting conditions in the F1 dev menu, and a lot of time finding the perfect angle for the shot, but they're still all in-game shots and the game can just look that good. I'm not even pushing it at all and still get results like these:
Running smoothly at 60 FPS with 15 AI cars. Much much better looking than the current version of rF2 with the added bonus that it runs much better. The physics aren't still there yet though, I definitely have to drive the cars in a way I could never get away with in any other sim (or real life for that matter) if I want to go fast. But it's around 12-15% done at the moment, and they have plenty of great people doing it who have vast experience in sim racing development from GPL to GTR2 to GTL and on. It's the first time they used the engine to do an all out sim so there's definitely a learning curve for them right there.
Eager to see how both fare, they fill different slots in the sim racing world and I hope both will succeed. And one last thing because it seems like the hip thing to say: DX11 doesn't really matter. pCARS looks next to identical in DX9 and DX11, and depending on the build and your computer will even run better in DX9, so that level is definitely achievable without having to use DX11.