That’s not how it works. The current method of high quality lighting in Gtsport involves pre-baking the global illumination lighting into light maps (storing lighting data via UV textures). It takes 30 minutes to pre-bake the lighting for each time setting for a track on a rendering server that is considerably more powerful than the PS4, and storing each high quality light map takes up a bunch of space. Since the lighting is static and baked via texture, it means you can get higher quality looking lighting that can come close to ray-traced lighting with minimal performance hit, the downside is the lighting cannot change in real time. Look at how long it takes to load each time setting in GTSport, it is impossible to create enough baked light maps for a smooth transition let alone have them load in instantly in real-time while racing.
With real-time lighting and global illumination there is no need for texture swaps, the lighting/GI is real-time. You don’t need ray-tracing to do a full 24h time change, see GT5/6. But full ray-tracing (path-tracing) will give you the most accurate and highest quality looking lighting and shadows, which is inherently real time as light particles simulate the real world and bounce around multiple objects before hitting the camera. Lighting can be changed in real time, and the shadows, global illumination, ambient occlusion will automatically change with it.
Don’t expect full on path-tracing on PS5, but again it’s not needed to do a full time change, they can just fake it with traditional rasterization methods.
