Forced baked lighting

[Dravic]

Why do so many games these days still force gamers to use baked lighting, a technique that's basically a fudge and has been around for nearly 30 years?

Raytracing capable hardware is 4 generations old and was introduced 7 years ago with over 90% of steam gamers now owning an RT capable card. It's a far superior technique producing more accurate, more immersive lighting, better visuals and saves developers time.

Most games I play these days are lit with RT and the lighting is a massive step up in quality, so much so that any non RT game (even ones with "good" baked lighting) look flat and a bit off.

Surely the current baked and RT options together are leading to increased Dev time and cost as games are essentially being lit twice?

 

[Hotwired]

You're not getting cheaper games.

Doesn't matter how they choose to light the scenes you're going to pay more and you're going to like it.

 

[Phixsator]

I really don't care how they do it outside of it being performant and RT is in most applications not very performant. I play games like The Division 2 and think it looks just fine for my needs. I would much rather have a focus on better NPC/AI and physics being more core to actual gameplay.

 

[Tetras]

with over 90% of steam gamers now owning an RT capable card.

Don't think they have a good enough RT card, in the sense of it being able to handle ray tracing well enough for what you're describing.

 

[Dravic]

I really don't care how they do it outside of it being performant and RT is in most applications not very performant. I play games like The Division 2 and think it looks just fine for my needs. I would much rather have a focus on better NPC/AI and physics being more core to actual gameplay.

This is the thing, if only RT was used that would free up the time and manpower to focus more on those things, everyone's a winner.

Don't think they have a good enough RT card, in the sense of it being able to handle ray tracing well enough for what you're describing.

True enough, but software RT is a thing (ie software Lumen), which seems to be far more performant than hardware based solutions especially for older cards.

 

[mid_gen]

Why do so many games these days still force gamers to use baked lighting, a technique that's basically a fudge and has been around for nearly 30 years?

Raytracing capable hardware is 4 generations old and was introduced 7 years ago with over 90% of steam gamers now owning an RT capable card. It's a far superior technique producing more accurate, more immersive lighting, better visuals and saves developers time.

Most games I play these days are lit with RT and the lighting is a massive step up in quality, so much so that any non RT game (even ones with "good" baked lighting) look flat and a bit off.

Surely the current baked and RT options together are leading to increased Dev time and cost as games are essentially being lit twice?

Because it works and the priority for many devs isn't the utmost in visual fidelity.

There'll be target performance and target hardware for each game, which is ultimately down to the devs to decide how restrictive they want their requirements to be. If they want to make a game that is accessible to gamers on older hardware, that's their prerogative, and if it won't run acceptably using ray-traced lighting on their target hardware, then there needs to be a baked lighting option.