LittleJohny, earlier you were arguing that all the lighting was 100% dynamic, including environmental, but that the sun was just in a fixed position. That simply isn't true. As I said earlier, the environmental light and shadow maps are all baked, and the lighting and shadows on the vehicles (including the interior) are dynamic. I also do think the sun moves slightly in the tracks for artistic effect (as I said before, to get certain overcasts, sun flares before at certain specific segments, a nice silhouette etc), but it doesn't always 100% map with environmental shadows because they would have been baked on a previously recorded sun position. So any changes thereafter would create a slight syncing issue between the two.
Dynamic environmental lighting and shadowing is a massively resource intensive addition. DriveClub devs actually claim they are using dynamic global illumination, which is a first for a racing game, and tremendously taxing. There's many other things that DriveClub does that makes it far more technically adept than Forza 5 (volumetric dynamically light affected smoke, much more condensed, geometrically complex physics based foliage etc etc), but that doesn't take away from the fact that Forza 5 is still a very pretty looking game, and runs at 60fps. Ultimately though, DC is just doing a hell of a lot more technically speaking, and the lighting differences between the two games are obvious even from brief comparisons.
Personally, I don't really care about the technical mumbo jumbo as much as I care about the features it brings. Dynamic time of day and night racing really ought to have been included with F5. As is, it doesn't seem like a particularly ambitious successor to F4, especially given the considerable boost in extra hardware grunt from the new console.
Dynamic environmental lighting and shadowing is a massively resource intensive addition. DriveClub devs actually claim they are using dynamic global illumination, which is a first for a racing game, and tremendously taxing. There's many other things that DriveClub does that makes it far more technically adept than Forza 5 (volumetric dynamically light affected smoke, much more condensed, geometrically complex physics based foliage etc etc), but that doesn't take away from the fact that Forza 5 is still a very pretty looking game, and runs at 60fps. Ultimately though, DC is just doing a hell of a lot more technically speaking, and the lighting differences between the two games are obvious even from brief comparisons.
Personally, I don't really care about the technical mumbo jumbo as much as I care about the features it brings. Dynamic time of day and night racing really ought to have been included with F5. As is, it doesn't seem like a particularly ambitious successor to F4, especially given the considerable boost in extra hardware grunt from the new console.