I’m playing on Xbox Series X.
The processing time after you take a photo feels long. It’s like 5-10 sec or sth. I know a few seconds isn’t really that long but it doesn’t quite make sense when it can load into a race with similar time.
It’s also quite annoying when I try to take the promotion photos on new cars which I may need to take 2-3 photos at the start of the race to get all cars recognized.
It’s not game breaking but I think this shouldn’t be too hard to fix. It doesn’t feel right that a single frame of screenshot take a few seconds to process while the game could run it at 60fps.
Right shoulder button (in the standard control configs) takes a "quick snap) photo that doesn’t do all the post-processing, much much better for Horizon Promo.
In photo mode, the game does accumulation rendering to produce motion blur, focal blur, and anti-aliasing of much higher quality than the post-processing effects used in real-time. Accumulation rendering means rendering the frame several hundred, or even several thousand times over with slight shifts in position or angle of the camera, and where objects are placed in the frame. This is done using a high bit-depth accumulation buffer where each frame is drawn on top of the previous ones.
When all those frames are combined, motion blur, focal blur, and anti-aliasing form naturally and produce realistic results. The real-time effects used during gameplay have quite unsightly artifacts if you look at a single frame. The accumulation is also why the photo fades in as it’s rendering. It literally becomes brighter as more and more frames are added.
So, in a nutshell, photo mode is slow because it isn’t just rendering a single frame – it’s rendering several hundred.
