The other day I recorded a video of me lapping Spa at night, but I recorded the video off of my saved replay. While watching it, I was surprised by how dark it was, darker than I remembered, and not seeing how I was able to run what I had run with such low visibility.
Earlier today I took mental note of what I was capable of seeing while I was racing and then immediately comparing that to what was visible during the replay. Clearly the game renders headlights very differently during replays. For one thing, in replay you can’t see nearly as far ahead and it seems to illuminate only surfaces very near to the headlights, while during the actual race you can not only see farther but light illuminates surfaces much farther from the car, like distant rails, signs, and lines painted on the track that during replay are only visible within a stone’s throw from the car. It’s like high beams during the race and low beams in replays. Further, the cone of light is dramatically dumbed down versus the more sophisticated light beams in the race, and look more like we’re rendering the replay headlights on the original Xbox.
It’s not a big deal. It’s not really hurting anything except the quality of night race videos. It just seems bizarre. I’m not sure what the need for dumbing the lighting down in replays would be. During the live race and replay the same hardware is rendering all the same stuff. If anything, it seems like more hardware resources should be freed up in replay because, at the very least, replays don’t have to handle AI like it does during the race.
I’m not really complaining. I’m basically just sharing a perplexing observation. I couldn’t find this mentioned anywhere so I guess either nobody has noticed or nobody wanted to bring it up.