There is no moonlight, skylight or ambient lighting in GT5 - there is in real life
Secondly, your eyes are far more sensitive than the crappy cams used in race cars.
Video cameras have very low dynamic range compared to film and eyes
In other words GT5 is mimicking the crap dynamic range of video cameras rather than our eyes, as I was saying along....
I know in real life the dash is never so dark during daytime that I can't read it!
Mimicking video during a replay is ok, but not while your playing
Hence people using video of real life races as a reference = facepalm
Video and GT5 has about 5 F-stops of dynamic range, film has more like 15, our eyes 24
Sorry to multiquote you like that, but GT5 does have "ambient" lighting because it uses image based lighting - the car dealership demonstrates that nicely. On top of that, it uses deferred rendering for the day / night locations and their massive quantities of lights, so a spatially-varying ambient lighting system is definitely workable, and visually apparent at Sarthe and Nürb for example. Moonlight does seem to be missing, though, which means most of the time the only "ambience" is from artificial lights which have a finite range - so you're right in that sense.
As for dynamic range, is the 24 stops for "one scene, at one time", or for the range our eyes can accommodate
overall, i.e. with time (chemical changes), or with certain extremes considered in isolation?
We should remember that TVs are low-dynamic-range devices. (I will admit it's pretty funny to see the people realising they had the output set incorrectly, though.) I think you're right that they are using a tone-mapping window in line with the dynamic range of video cameras, but that's probably partly because they're designed for these exact display devices we're all using.
If anyone cares, I use a PC monitor (which has to accept the full gamut, by default) and I personally think the darkness in GT5 is very well done, given the limitations of the display device. But perhaps they should broaden the input window in their tone mapping a touch for better daylight legibility of gauges and less annoying tunnel exits.
Something else to think about is the distracting, ugly and sometimes obscuring effect of the colour compression in the game (memory bandwidth limitation, perhaps).
There not being better display devices available is, I think, the real issue, though.
