Dead Rising on Xbox 360: think you could do more zombies?

OK, I've been playing lots of Dead Rising lately since it was only $20
downloaded from Xbox Live.

Apparently this game uses its own engine called "MT Framework".

Now, I hadn't thought about it from a gamedev perspective before, but
crowds of zombies *is* something that will max out any GPU, given
enough zombies.  (Of course this isn't specific to zombies, its just
the situation at hand in a zombie game.)

While playing the game its obvious that they're using some kind of
instancing as there are a certain number of distinct zombie types that
are repeated to make up a crowd.  According to [1], Dead Rising 2 will
have up to 6,000 on-screen zombies.

That's significantly more than appear on-screen in Dead Rising, so
obviously the team has improved/reworked their engine to handle more
zombies.

Suppose we assume Direct3D 11 level hardware for the purposes of the
conversation.  Obviously instancing is going to be important and it
seems the crowd technique discussed in GPU Gems 3 (see the "Skinned
Instancing" demo in the NVidia SDK 10) would be applicable here.

In Dead Rising, there doesn't appear to be per-zombie LODs, just
distance based culling of chunks of the zombie crowd.  (This becomes
obvious when navigating the park between the mall plazas, you can see
chunks of the crowd pop into view.)

Would you use per-instance LODs?

Would you use imposters/billboards for distant zombies?

I'd be interested in hearing thoughts from the list.

[1] http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3173505
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