Originally Posted by: opencamswrx 
Originally Posted by: EpicEvan777 
Originally Posted by: NumberlessMath 
I was once under the impression you were going to take a picture of your monitor with a camera.
I was going to and I can but I'd rather get much better quality. If I have to resort to that I will however.
Can't wait to see more photos. I'd like to see what you're seeing, verbatim!
My TV and PC monitor are SDR...
That's the problem I've come to realize. No matter what I do, even if I take a 4K HDR capture, unless you view it on a professionally calibrated 4K HDR screen, you won't be able to see what I'm seeing unfortunately.
I can describe it however:
Forza's lighting model suffers from over-exposure and excessive bloom. This is the main problem which effects all areas of the lighting model which causes:
1. A loss of detail in the skybox, namely over-exposure making clouds less visable and reducing detail. It also increases the brightness of the game in general and makes the sun abnormally large which covers up most of the sky. You also lose color detail in the sun as it becomes more white without the yellow / orange ring you get when you look at the sun in real life.
2. Excessive bloom on any white or yellow object, mainly cars, though this can effect objects like walls.
3. Lack of road and object detail either hidden by the general darkness of the game or by the over-exposure and bloom.
4. Over saturation of colors making the game look slightly artificial.
5. Excessive white highlights on car paint making it look artificial.
The reason a HDR display fixes this is because you can calibrate the display yourself to reduce these issues. Maxing out the HDR Brightness and HDR Gamma, then reducing the brightness of your display reduces the overall bloom and exposure of the game which fixes for the most part problem one and two, though not completely. The game still suffers from an over-exposure and bloom issue though it can be dramatically reduced when you calibrate the display yourself. Problems three through four are pretty much completely fixed with an alternative HDR calibration however.
So to summarise, here's the issues I believe Forza's lighting model has:
1. Poor HDR and SDR calibration.
2. Excessive bloom and over-exposure (which probably causes the brake light issues you're experiencing).
3. No volumetric lighting and a two-point spotlight system.
4. Excessive refractive index in paint on cars (which can be fixed manually).
5. Lack of objects casting shadows or blocking light, mostly trees.
6. No pre-baked ray tracing (though this is tough with a dynamic lighting system).
Now most of this can be chalked up to hardware limitations. To achieve a native 4K resolution a locked 60 FPS, 24 cars on track at once and a dynamic weather model on the One X, issue three, five and six are more than likely hardware limitations. However issues one, two and four are things Turn 10 can resolve easily.