Maybe I stated it incorrectly before but it doesn't matter if you turn ray tracing on or off. In GT Auto, the ray tracing is on all the time on my PS5 Pro. It's the only location in the game where ray tracing is on no matter what. This doesn't happen in the garage, no matter what scenery you have. It doesn't happen in the livery editor, no matter what scenery you have. It's only GT Auto.
So, given this issue has existed for a few years (well before PS5 Pro) and it's only in GT Auto, my gut instinct is that it's a GT Auto issue and not a game wide issue or PS5 Pro issue. If the Ray tracing setting affects everything EXCEPT GT Auto, then GT Auto is likely the issue. Also, saying that it might be materials, etc., seem strange. They wouldn't go so far as to add new materials to each car, would they?
It may not be a completely different renderer, but it's different. Go back and look at GT6. Gt Auto looked like it had a different rendered back then, it even used different car models compared to the garage. It used the highest level in game car rather than the garage car.
Yes the lighting in GTAuto is unique in GT7.
You can tell this even from the cube maps. It's not like scapes where the lighting is sampled from a high resolution light probe with realistic power distribution (as in, it's a real life scene). It's an artificial scene, but unlike the livery editor, it not only has high intensity lighting, but the sources are tiny and extremely high contrast. The livery editor is uniform.
To have this kind of high contrast lighting in the livery editor would make it harder to see the livery as the lighting would highlight the curvature of the body. So you don't get this kind of lighting in the livery editor. So you don't see this "spatio-temporal" under sampling issue in the ray tracing on the wheels in the livery editor.
I'm not talking about the materials on the vehicles, but in the scene, those which would contribute to the cube map and by extension those which dictate the frame to frame variance in the rays received and reflected by the vehicle - which is the actual issue you're seeing.
I'm saying you personally clearly still need an option to turn off ray tracing in GTAuto even with the changes, even with a Pro, even though the game doesn't allow this in its current form; even though you
shouldn't have to. This is just the nature of real time ray tracing: not enough rays despite all the tricks used - especially on AMD hardware.
Having different models (more or less polygons in GT6) is completely different from having different renderers (different pipelines). Running at different resolutions for different shaders or effects etc. is completely different from having different transport equations just for GTAuto.
Ironically, that is the fix: it needs different sampling, filtering and reconstruction if more rays can't be afforded, just for the unique lighting challenge presented by GTAuto.
Or, the
option to turn it off.