According to Art Director Stuart Campbell, Codemasters has raised the bar for spectacular graphics yet again.
Interestingly, they seem to be proudest about the new night race visuals - night racing is a thing in Formula; there are no less than three night races scheduled for the year.
"Night lighting was one of our visual update priorities for F1® 2019. We took the atmospherics system that we introduced in F1® 2018 for daytime lighting, and further developed this for the night tracks. We now have full atmospheric haze on night circuits, giving a true sense of depth. There’s a lot of dust in the air on those circuits and, at night, the particles really interact with the strong trackside lighting.
The atmospherics help pull the whole scene together and give a greater sense of realism. We have added volumetric lighting to the trackside lighting, which results in the cones of light falling off from the light sources – another key factor in making night lighting look more realistic. Finally, we added nighttime specular. This was not present at all in previous games and made the nighttime scenes look rather flat, and the surface materials ambiguous.
The specular additions have made a huge improvement to the quality of the track materials at night. The extra surface information provided by this allows you to see all the surface details that were lost previously. The vehicle paint, in particular, looks amazing on the night circuits, and picks-up highlights from all those track-side light sources making it look incredibly close to TV footage of the sport itself."
F1 2019 launches on June 28 in the US.