>>41953>Without ray tracing, games have been using cheap tricks to poorly approximate how lighting looks like in real life, but they all break easily.I wouldn't use the word "cheap tricks", over the years, people have worked out really efficient and ingenious ways to "cheat" how light works in real time rendering. Real time RT is just the technology finally getting to the point where we can get viable performance in real time. Even then, still with a lot of caveats like upscaling, framegen, limiting the amount of light bounces, and so on.
>(even if you use "baked" lighting, which is labor intensive and has many issues, although it can produce great results). I don't think the issue with baked lighting is just the fact that it's labour intensive, it definitely is, but there's also the fact that saving those baked light maps takes a lot of space, especially in games with dynamic time of day, weather systems, dynamic/destructable enviroments, or open worlds, or worse yet, all of them combined.
Cutting down on the work to manually light every scene is nice, yeah, but also the fact that running all those calculations locally instead of having a ton of lightmaps as part of the game's install would save a lot of space for the end user in addition to making it easier for the devs.
Don't think the compute is there yet though, at least not until mid-end consumer/console tier GPUs can run say, fully path traced cyberpunk at a stable 30 w/o upscaling and framegen, at least at 1440p. shit like framegen shouldn't be the way forward. And with the way things are going, I don't see it happening anytime soon.