Bandai Namco released a new promotional trailer for Project CARS 2 featuring the latest McLaren 720S super car. The trailer is only a minute and a half, but we get to see a lot of different things on display to better understand the tech that they’re using and what sort of graphical effects are being applied.

The trailer starts by giving us a look at the dynamic use of lighting for real time day and night shifts. We see how the buildings look during dusk, what the palm trees look like during the sun setting, and some shots of the night life.

The trailer briefly covers the use of planar reflections across the wet street surface, with real-time light distortion and reflective surface imaging working hand in hand with the physically based light rendering.

In essence, this means that lights from the environment actually reflect onto the environment, and it coincides with showing almost mirrored images of the surroundings in things like puddles on the track surface, as indicated in the image below.

What’s most impressive is that none of this is pre-baked. All of the light sourcing, shadows and shaders you see rendered are happening in real-time across the track. This kind of directional lighting means that they aren’t pasted textures or alphas across projected vector planes giving the illusory image of track reflections. It’s real-time, baby.

The trailer finally gets to the milky goodness at the center of the sweet exterior: the McLaren. We see the car finally make a dynamic appearance close to the 30 second mark in the trailer below.

You see the brake pads heating up during tight turns, you get a good sense of the car’s mass as it moves quickly around the track, and the reflections – once again – look superb moving across the fiberglass body of the expensive sports machine.

The game still doesn’t quite look like realism achieved, but it comes fairly close.

The shocks and tire physics also look vastly improved, judging from the trailer, but of course we won’t know for sure until the game is in our hands. But we see more body-rock during the distribution of the weight from one side to the other during tight turns where the g-force takes center stage. We also see how the aerodynamics come into play, where the rear-end slightly dips down and tilts to the left as the McLaren squeezes a drift out of a hairpin turn.

It’s good looking stuff.

The game is due out later this year for the PS4, Xbox One and PC. Sadly, no Nintendo Switch port this time around.