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It's been known for some time that these franchises struggle with their lighting system. Dan Greenawalt admitted that every track has its own lighting fine tuned instead of an overall system that would work everywhere. Digital Foundry (Youtube) talked about this when they compared GT Sport and Forza 7. The lighting system in GT is a lot more realistic-looking. We can only hope this is yet another area that the team will work on as part of its "Forza Fundamentals" because cars and tracks are already built with a very high level of detail.

What's the excuse for going downhill from FM6 into FM7?

X3R Monkey - I do agree on GTS lighting engine, it is fantastic and very consistent.

NumberlessMath - yes exactly! I find it amusing when people have explanations for the lighting inconsistencies or somewhat defend it passively - there's no excuse whatsoever as it looked fine in FM5 and 6.

There's a very simple excuse for lighting getting worse from Forza Motorsport 5, 6 & 7. It's because of dynamic weather.

When you pre-bake lighting conditions, it'll always look far better then when you have it dynamically. This is why Forza Motorsport 5 looks the best by far. It's one lighting condition pre-baked. Why does GT Sport look so good? Everything is pre baked with ray tracing. Why did NFS 2015 look so beautiful? Same exact reason.

Pretty much this. Hopefully the extra dev time and performance of the next gen consoles will mitigate the issues of dynamic time and weather.

The lighting isn't necessarily worse. It's just dark on most tracks, low-contrast to the point of poor visibility.

Forza has baked static shadows and dynamic car/object shadows.
GT Sport has full dynamic shadows, on static and moving objects.

I'd rather they go back to the pre-baked lighting conditions. I don't care much for dynamic time of day or weather changes unless they do it properly like PCARS2 does.

I was watching a GTS vs FM7 comparison the other day - and man, does GTS look stunning at different times of day. It's all very consistent.

What display do you have? HDR or SDR?

GT Sport is completely pre-baked with ray tracing. Everything is pre-destined. Hence why there's no dynamic ttime of day or conditions. Every track has it's own lighting condition in GT Sport which is tailored for its specific needs which is why you see lighting updates and such.

I'd personally have the dynamic weather. Going from Sunny, to lighting and rain then back to completely sunny, yet the track still being wet and hard to drive is really fun.

Unfortunately to get dynamic weather, conditions, time of day and such, graphical fidelity had to be cut slightly. The big hit was stuff like trees and grass and foliage in general. Compare that to FM5 and it's almost like you're looking at the same game but FM5 being in Spring whereas FM7 looks like it's in Winter.

It's SDR.
If HDR display is necessary to play, why isn't it in the system requirements on Microsoft Store?

I'm not saying it's necessary but the calibration from Turn 10 on SDR displays is terrible, If you have a HDR display, you can easily fix it, hence my questions as if you had a HDR display, I could've made the game probably look instantly better with a different calibration setting.

Necessary to play? I play with a full hd TN monitor and it's enough.

It's an LG, 25", 2560x1080 IPS.
Forza Motorsport 7 is meant to look correct on HDR displays only. The requirement should be listed in the Microsoft store, or an alternate version of each track prepared for SDR screens.

It looked fine on my old 1080p TV and also looks fine on my 4K HDR display,

https://forums.forzamoto...htness-adjustment.aspx?=

The HDR calibration is just as bad. Only difference is you can fix it.

Evan, would you be kind enough to post some shots of brake lights in different conditins? I.e. a variety of day and night track conditions, and possibly rain?

The brake lights just don't have the right color or the correct level of glow/illumination. It was fine in their older xbox one forza games.

It's pretty much down to bad color calibration internally in the game. Not an HDR vs SDR issue, according to my understanding.

I've got other HDR games that display colors flawlessly on my SDR TV: GOW4, SOTR, ghost recon, Shadow of Mordor, Witcher 3, etc.

I'd be more than happy to however I'd only be able to take the picture on my phone which isn't the best (2018 Samsung Galaxy J6+).

Do you want the brake lights on or off?

It's actually very easy to display direct screens here on the forum which I think you may know already;

Take photos in the game, then access them here in your Gallery. Open each one of the photos but don't save them.

When you're ready to post in this thread, add [IMG] before the link and right at the end of the link add [/IMG] - I'm pretty sure that's the trick, unless I'm wrong.

You'd want to use the "create link" option and then paste it here. That's how I did it when I posted shots of those dreadful orange looking lights in one of the posts I created recently.

And with the brake lights on preferrebly - with and without brakes. Here's a link to that post where I posted one photo with just the brake lights on and another one while applying the brakes:

https://forums.forzamoto...orange-brake-lights.aspx

Edited by user Saturday, August 17, 2019 12:35:22 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I can do it that way but the only problem with that is the brightness difference. I'm running -17 on brightness so I may have to alter the image slightly to achieve the look that's on the TV.

Also if you're not viewing the photo on a HDR screen, it wouldn't look correct anyway. I'll try my best though.

thanks - I very much appreciate you doing this.

Here's three images I captured today, I would have captured some more and will do in different conditions soon but Forza's sharing system is acting up.

There are a few things to consider here however:

1. My TV is professionally calibrated to have around 98 to 99% colour accuracy amidst other changes. Depending on your display that might vary the image slightly.

2. My TV's brightness has been adjusted.

3. This is captured on a One X (4K HDR). If you're not viewing the image on a HDR screen, that might change things.

Essentially, the image may have changed slightly. You won't see exactly what I see unless you're looking at my TV if that makes sense. A few more things to note:

1. None of the images have been altered in any way in photo-mode or post photo-mode.

2. My in-game Forza HDR setting has been altered (HDR Gamma Maxed, HDR Brightness Maxed, TV Brightness adjusted to compensate, tracking 2.4 Gamma).

3. Every photo taken at 1.0 Zoom level at ground level.

With that aside, here's a few pictures:


(Rain & Lightning Conditions)


(Rain & Lightning Conditions)


(Rain & Lightning to Partly Cloudy Conditions)

I'll try and post some more pictures in different conditions later on such as fog, night, day etc.

Edited by user Saturday, August 17, 2019 5:16:56 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Can you post one in the middle of the of the final turn at Brands Hatch, fog conditions, cockpit view, and another at the start of turn one? Those 2 areas were very dark when I tried racing a mostly-black Ford Hawk II.

I think this is fog, not sure.

Edited by user Saturday, August 17, 2019 6:44:38 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

To my knowledge, that's not fog. Just extremely overcast. To get fog, you have to select a rain race and select one of the 3 presets which I believe are 'dense fog', 'ground fog' and 'light fog'.

But yes, of course I can take those pictures.

Hey Evan, thanks a lot! I just wanted to see the brake lights and nothing else. :)

Aaaand... there's the trouble - I see the brake lights on your P1 are orange, not red! They need to be blood red with a nice glow/halo around them - like FM5 and 6, and real life, really.

It's settled then - an HDR screen would mean didley squat. The game's lighting model is gimped and as I suspect it has something to do with the auto-exposure not working correctly.

Are you also seeing orange lights on your P1 photos, instead for a nice "glowy" red?

You can even see that on the tarmac the reflections look red, but the car's actual lights are a dull orange-yellow shade.

The colours typically look off in cloudy, foggy and overcast conditions. But generally look fine when you're driving at night or when the sun is completely out with very little clouds. However, when the brakes do look red, they are missing that bloom/glow effect that you see in real cars that do have "glowy" lights (LaF, P1, or other cars with 'trippy' looking LED brake lights).

Edited by user Sunday, August 18, 2019 8:20:43 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified