Scott Kirkland, the Technical Director behind MotorStorm, sat down with Beyond3D recently to talk about some of the more technical details of developing the intense off-road racer. They cover a pretty wide range of topics, from Evolution's contributions in developing the Havok 4.5 physics middleware, to culling unseen vertices in order to increase rendering performance. Here are a couple highlights:

On SPU usage:
"MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we're aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"

On using the SPUs and RSX for cooperative rendering:
"The leap in performance provided by [the SPUs] gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."

It is a fantastic read, and well worth checking out. It gets EXTREMELY technical at a couple points, so don't feel bad if your brain catches on fire. I set off the fire alarm twice.