So now it is out there how much the time of day and lighting can drastically effect the scene, It is ok to assume that we can recreate the swamp scene from SoD trailer. And does that not 'solve' the entire downgrade thread?
Sadly it isn't going to solve anything, and it wasn't really meant to, it was just an interesting comparison. Case and point is that there's already a discussion happening over whether one of these is from a Console build, and whether or not one image has better
leaves.
The point of the comparison is just to display how drastically different a scene can look based on the time of day, and presumably weather conditions. (We can thank IGN for somehow obtaining this picture, I don't know how they got it but it fits perfectly with the footage we got).
However it is my firm belief that as long as CDPR hasn't ripped entire effects/features out of the game (Forward Soft Lit Particles, Volumetric Clouds, Particle effects like the leaves from the (in)famous VGX GIF etc), you crank that bad boy up to Ultra, find the same time of day or weather condition to match the specific moment and yes, I think Marcin is right that anything from VGX/SoD will be able to be re-created. Perhaps not 1:1, maybe that good 'ol VGX Gif won't look precisely the same because the new lighting doesn't quite give off the same effect, or the sharpening is gone, but it'll look pretty fucking close. (Or of course the fact that Eredin has been redesigned, but that's a given)