Yeah, I think GTA has been doing a good job at handling these things gracefully.
Regarding your second point, I'm not sure if you've seen how it's handled in CP? Basically all roads in the distance have a string of car/headlight sprites (yes, 2D) moving on them. Makes the world look amazingly populated and alive.
However the density of the sprite cars is much higher than the actual cars (depending on your settings). So when driving on a long road you always seem to be chasing a large group of cars that you can never reach. There seems to be no connection between actual cars spawning in and the sprite based crowd illusion.
And if you use a scope with good zoom to observe the sprite cars, it looks very funny. Basically you have very obvious Doom faux-3D sprites in an otherwise stunning environment.
Regarding your second point, I'm not sure if you've seen how it's handled in CP? Basically all roads in the distance have a string of car/headlight sprites (yes, 2D) moving on them. Makes the world look amazingly populated and alive.
However the density of the sprite cars is much higher than the actual cars (depending on your settings). So when driving on a long road you always seem to be chasing a large group of cars that you can never reach. There seems to be no connection between actual cars spawning in and the sprite based crowd illusion.
And if you use a scope with good zoom to observe the sprite cars, it looks very funny. Basically you have very obvious Doom faux-3D sprites in an otherwise stunning environment.