It's a damn beautiful looking game, with the usual cuts in parts that GT has always made cuts, but thankfully with the power levels we're at and graphical fidelity they're much less of a problem now.
The car models look incredible, along with the dashboard and windscreen reflections and shadows.
The headlights look fantastic for the most part, just a shame that the shadows that other cars in your headlights cast are low resolution.
The tracks look eh, but being a racing game I don't really care tbh. I'm looking at the other cars and the tarmac, don't really care if the tracks don't blow me away.
Load times look amazing when going into races, but why does it seemingly take almost as long to load going from one place on the menu map into another as it does to load into a full blown race? Makes no sense. GTs never ending nested menus have always been a pain point for me, and was honestly one of the main reasons why I gave the series away shortly after buying GT5. That game was 5 mins of loading just to get a new car and modify it for a 5 minute race (with another 1-2 minute loading to get into the race). They've fixed 95% of the problem with the loading, hopefully they'll work on the other 5% next.
The performance, while it looks perfectly fine for the majority of the time, is still not where it should be for a flagship title like this. It should be locked 60fps all the time - no drops, ever, and definitely not for extended time periods when you've got a congested field. It doesn't really matter that it's a worst case scenario, that should be catered for. If it can't handle having all the cars on the track on the screen at once without dropping the framerate then they need to further optimize it. No drops, ever, should be the number 1 goal of any racing game. This is one area that GT has always been significantly behind Forza Motorsport and Horizon at - they just don't drop frames, ever. Full field, night time, rain, whatever - 60fps for Motorsport and 30/60fps for Horizon, all the time. Good to see Polyphony are heading in the right direction, but they still need to prioritize framerate over all IMO. VRR would almost make it a non-issue, but the goal should still be a locked unwavering 60fps.
I don't care about replays and scapes and all that, literally haven't watched a replay in a racing game since maybe GT2 on the PS1. It's a shame that they're still adding extra detail and LODs for replays and photo mode though.
The always online DRM doesn't bother me at all, but I'm sure it will - or should going by previous topics - trigger a lot on here. Very weird decision by Polyphony and any reasoning they can give doesn't really make any sense. If they can't protect their save files from being modified or detect modifications then that needs to be their priority, not enforcing always online for a game that shouldn't require it in any way.
When they praise the shadows from headlights they look bad to me, fuzzy/low res and moving in steps.
Yeah they're very low res, almost GT5 smoke shadow reminiscent, but the overall effect still looks fantastic IMO.
Was there any mention of total number of cars and actual unique circuits? (not counting 10 different variations of the circuit for example)