You cannot compare the baked lighting of GT5 to the dynamic lighting of rF2 and other graphic engines: the former will almost always look better, at the expense of being fixed for eternity.
Dynamic lighting can look really dull and generally looks better in the morning or at the end of the day, when the sun is lower and there are more shadows. Speaking of which, it might not be a coincidence that the default track time for the Nords is 10h40.
I didn't really want to go too deep into that discussion.
First we need to define few topics there. Are we talking about lighting. Are we talking about dynamic range/color space. Are we talking about "too saturated/too bright curbs" etc.
BTW GT5 did have dynamic lighting, but yes, baked version of Nords looked better, for few reasons.
Obviously it's quite a challenge to make a 24-h cycle game engine which would look good enough at all conditions, while still fitting into very limited dynamic range of sRGB format, which is majority of our monitors.
Some titles do that with over-aggressive HDR which people used to hate, luckly nowadays HDR is more clever than it was 10 years ago, so you don't often see the image slowly (but still annoyingly noticeably) getting darker/brighter all the time. Some of the titles have various dynamic range presets for various times of day and weather conditions, one can still say it's "pre-baked", but the daytime/weather do change in realtime, while "pre-baked" dynamic range allows you to enjoy the experience without screen going pitch black in shadows at low sun conditions, or being overly bright at daytime.
Then, going back to albedo problem: in order for albedo to show correctly it needs more calculations going within the material/shader, and also ideally very advanced SSAO/ raytraced shadows + shadow overdraw (which in itself is excluded from a lot of game engines as it's a potential can of worms). Without it albedo very often will look just like blocky too bright or too pale diffuse. If you prebake some shading to it, one may argue that it may not correspond to current daytime conditions, say, under bright sunlight, but unfortunate thing is - if you don't prebake at least something, then it doesn't correspond with any other conditions. To my personal taste, some pre-baking of shading still wouldn't hurt to make the texture look overall good enough and fit into as much conditions as possible.
I could give you examples of engines that work totally fine and beautiful with changing lighting conditions, just to make you realize it's not an excuse.
But i dont want it to turn into bashing of rf2 as I'm still very much enjoying what this sim delivers.
