This may not apply in all games but I’ve played some games with day/night cycles, but overall the experience I got was that most of the time, when during night time, the game had FPS drops lower than day time. For example, I played NFS Heat and I get around 30 fps at day. When I play at night, for some unknown reason for me, it drops about 5-10 fps at most. It’s a very shallow question I know, but I would love to get an answer from y’all since this has been one of those things you can’t really shake off your mind
In: Technology
As others have mentioned, it has to do with lighting, however it has to complexity of the scenes. At night artificial light is the main source of light most of the time, which means many different light sources and harsher shadows, and to make those shadows look better you need more rays to project to get a decent outline of a 3D model. Also there’s just more light sources to calculate and make shadows for.
Then you get into thinks like ambient occlusion, some games calculate this on the fly which also takes more processing power with more light sources.
Tl;Dr, lights take a lot to render well.
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