those project cars gifs dont look nearly as good as driveclub. not sure what youre on about driveclubs lighting being spectacular as opposed to realistic either.
I don't feel like arguing with you about which one looks better, especially when "beautiful" is such a vague word.
What I mean about the lighting is that DC use spectacular lighting to enhance the artistic quality of its images.
As I said, I find DC more "beautiful" than DC in an artistic way (and i'm sorry fresquito but video and gifs are good sources to judge that despie not having the shaprness of the real one).
Pcars is using a more realistic lighting, hence a little more "boring to look", and you need to find specific moment of the day to show off lighting condition on par with DC (just like when you want to take a photo in real life).
And let's face it, tracks have mostly very dull look because of security reasons (large space to run off, borded by grandstand for the spectators). Open road are always more exciting to look at.
Both game look awesome, and both are out from alpha stage. DC [1080p 30fps, 12 cars on track] will be out in October, and pCARS [1080p 60fps, ~50cars on track] will be out in November.
Not confirmed yet for pcars (at least there weren't 50 cars in the video shown).
Devs still need to wait for the optimization to be finished and test different situation to see how many cars console will be able to display while maintaining the framerate iw the worse case scenarios. The is also network limitation for multiplayer.
But indeed, pcars has already shown console vids with more than 12 cars on track