Why are lights such an issue for BeamNG.drive?

Why is it that when you add street lights and things at night, your PC will literally shit itself? Is it just a limitation of Torque3D itself?

I mean... I've even seen people on like RTX PCs and what might as well be NASA supercomputers, and even they will often talk about how city lights will bring the performance to its knees. Performance is usually average if it's a small town and a couple lights here or there. Now a mid-sized or larger city, yeah good luck with that.

It sucks not being able to have lights at night, especially in urban areas. It often looks weird without them. And I always wondered why lights are something the engine or the game struggles with so much. Especially when you consider everything else. Shaders, reflections, day time lighting, all of it looks stellar and this close to photorealistic. But then at night when you add lights, the game freaks out and doesn't know what to do.

I also was wondering if there was ever the possibility of an alternative. For example, baked lighting? While I don't even know if it'd be possible for the engine to support such a thing, I feel like using dynamic lights during the day and then switching to a baked lighting system at night (or for indoor areas like tunnels) could be a more feasible option. Even if it doesn't look as great, I'd still take that over no lights at all.

While I'm only on a Ryzen 7 5700X, 1660 Ti, and 16 GB RAM, I can max out the game easily and have about ten or so cars before performance begins to drop significantly. And again, day time is gorgeous.

My friend is on an RTX 4090, the latest high-end Intel CPU (I don't know which, I'm not good with Intels lol), and like 64 GB of RAM. He can run the game at 1080p with no issues period, for obvious reasons. But even when he tries to play on a night map with lots of lights, his PC just goes "Nope!" And he's not even doing 4K.

 

One of the issues is that BeamNG does so well in just about every area, and when it comes to graphics, night lighting is the only thing we're mostly missing at this point. We've got almost everything else down to a tee in graphics. But if lights and shadows are such a performance issue, and we don't have a way to combat it, then that honestly sucks. Because that also means that BeamNG has less to work with as well. They can't make BeamNG look its best, or at least reasonably close to it without sacrificing performance. And it's honestly hilarious that considering how stunning BeamNG already looks, with its reasonable reflections, excellent day lighting, metallic paints, PBR materials, high poly counts, and even its 1000 FPS soft body physics, it's the dynamic lighting of all things, especially at night, that seems to cripple a computer.

For example it might ultimately mean that all of BeamNG's planned career, at least for towns and cities, places with lights, has to take place in the day. Because otherwise, driving/racing in a rural town, or through urban BC streets, or a completely unlit raceway, doesn't exactly look right.

 

Pretty much. The physics engine they've made is fantastic and the rest leaves a lot to be desired. The foundation of the graphics is pretty much from the mid 2000s, and it shows.

 

alot to unwrap here.

shadows can be baked or dynamic, the latter can be very hard on CPUs and GPUs which can drop performance due to requiring to render the scene twice. having more light sources will require more shadows to be rendered as well. A higher shadow resolution will require more workload from the GPU and the ram to store the shadow maps.

Lets talk about your friend with the 4090. so 4090 requires alot of cpu resources as well. 1080p exacerbates this requirement, hence the cpu (i9-13900k) cannot cope with such workload even on 4k but that would be for other games. (the higher the resolution, the lower cpu resource requirement, but half the fps due to being alot more computationally expensive), also, get your friend to use Vulkan, rtx 40 series have a serious boost in vulkan, from 150 fps to 250 fps in my 4080. (in beamng DX11 doesn't utilize gpu fully on the rtx 40 series)