New F1 2019 screens show lighting comparison to 2018

Codemasters and Koch Media are starting their engines to bring F1 2019 to PC, PS4, and Xbox One on June 28, and to generate a little more excitement before we can get in the driver's seat, a new batch of screens have been released comparing the lighting effects in last year's game to this one.

"Night lighting was one of our visual update priorities for F1® 2019. We took the atmospherics system that we introduced in F1 2018 for day time lighting, and further developed this for the night tracks," art director Stuart Campbell said.

"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 night time specular. This was not present at all in previous games and made the night time 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."

You can see how all this looks in the screenshots below, showing several circuits in action from behind the wheel. Are you impressed?