Here's a post made by Alex Ward of Criterion last month:
 
-------------------------------------------------------
I think I'll let one of the other members of the Burnout Team respond to this...  
 
 
"It's such a shame that a lot of people appear to have been jaded by first-generation PS2 games. And it's stange to hear this directed at Criterion in particular, have any of you guys seen Airblade?  
 
Burnout (our first PS2 game) flickered a LOT due to 2 main reasons, it used the PS2s interlaced approach to rendering and it didn't use mip-mapping - both of these were early design decisions which we were forced to stick with, and as you all know it has been Burnouts largest source of criticism. However, we learnt so much during the development of Burnout that we were able to improve massively on it for the sequel.  
 
Burnout 2 renders at a higher resolution than it displays (which is significantly more than double that of the first game), has mipmaps on everything, and combined with the well-known flicker filter hardware it doesn't flicker any more, I can promise you that. We've more than doubled the texture data thrown about every frame, upped the poly counts of all cars by 50% or more and added more effects (in addition to the new lighting effect that you've heard about) and we're still locked solid at 60hz - any less than that is not an option, in fact there's no excuse for it any more. All this from a few months work from myself and another graphics coder - we're a small team but do not doubt our ability to produce impressive results.  
 
Anybody doubting that the PS2 can match the Gamecube (and even the XBox in certain respects) is deluding themselves, it's pretty much that simple."