Going back to the shader stuff, everyone is just talking about car reflections, and that's not the only thing shaders can do. Here's an interesting list of what could be done with shaders for LFS:
1.- Road shine: With the road shine effect we can get the sun position to create a position and a rotation to recreate the sun on the pavement.
2.- Motion blur: Sometimes, I find the blur effect really annoying, specially in third-person games like NFS. But if you just simulate the blur that camera causes, it can help to improve the speed feeling.
3.- Bloom: This isn't a very realistic effect if you make the bloom more visible than in real-life is. In real life, the bloom is slightly visible, and this effect is a processor eater to make it slightly visible in a game but meh, it is cool anyway.
4.- Particles, 3D objects distortion and environment objects (well, this depends on how the game interacts with DirectX)
This is the part I like. With this, developers can recreate the actual particles to make them look better, and even, make certain parts of the car go out when the driver crashes. It is also possible to simulate paint deformation and dust.
In the environment, dynamic clouds, dynamic sun, make working car lights and maybe the possibility of night support, but all this is the very hard part
And a looooooot more... Your computer hasn't to be high-end to do all this, excepting the Bloom effect but meh, all this can be always optional :P.