menos
but I feel it is still not enough
This part is not that much about optimization (those lights lit up most of screen’s pixels at their current range anyway). While rearranging other stuff in v18, I made them a bit too dim, I’ll fix it. 
Also, of course, all the ranges, color, position, etc. will be defined on per-car basis, and I’ll try to guess these values from Content Manager (it already can do a lot of guessing for lights in Custom Showroom).
The illumination of the track to the sides feels great and is spot on in my opinion - thumbs up here!
Nice, thanks, glad to hear it!
Currently this effect is almost completely lacking - mirrors are too dim to feel real.
Oh, that’s a great idea, I could just turn their brightness up, a lot. I’ll try. 
That simplification mostly meant that other cars don’t have brake lights in there, don’t have flame lights, lights are merged and without speculars. By the end, all of that will be customizable as well.
"blinding effect" from headlights when facing the camera - is it possibly with the shader patch that headlights that face the camera within a specific narrow angle (say +/- 5deg) could get very high intensity and a large bright halo effect to create a "blinding effect"
Another great idea! I have to think about how it could be done, but I’ll try to come up with something.
Please keep it this way - great job (to be honest it looks much better and more realsitic than PC2 as it is right now ;-)
Wow, really glad to hear it, thanks! Although I was thinking about changing the shading model a bit, but I’ll try to keep it close to its current state visually. If you want, I’ll be putting some preview builds in that Discord server.
Currently the headlight reflections (I guess this is a canned "illusionary effect" at the moment ?) has a little too much of a mismatch
Hmm, maybe it’s because of merging? Or because for now I hardcoded settings for 911 Carrera S? About performance, replays might do badly because now, lights even delay merging if view angle is low, and there is no check on how many cars are in frame right now. Something to optimize later.
Also, of course, Magic Bloom can be very expensive, and, anyway, I’m working on cutting of Reshade as a whole (so it’ll be properly compatible with any filter injectors or, let’s say, Steam overlay).
As for benchmark, if you want, you can run a short benchmark in video settings, I guess you’d need to replace BENCHMARK.acr from Kunos for night mode though. But it counts FPS and shuts down after a specific frame, so values are pretty uniform. That’s how I measured FPS hits for various values for that updated video settings section.
m3gt2 I think it’s Shift+F2.
JMartinni oh, ok, I’ll just raise threshold. Usually front disks are lit much brighter, so it should work (values I saw were, like, 9.5 for front and 2.5 for rear ones, I’ll set threshold somewhere in ≈5 area). And, of course, it’ll be an option as well, no problem to move those values to some INI-file. Also, thank you for reference photos!
