It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.
Dynamic lighting already exists. Look at Phasmophobia, it’s probably one of the heaviest Unity games because it uses it everywhere. Basically every light in that game is able to cast shadows, and it’s got a lot of lights. Doesn’t have any of the RT noise or lag too.
edit: it doesn’t come cheap though, they had to do some downgrades to port it to consoles. Interior candles for example, they’re no longer interactive.
Yes, but it can be inefficient performance-wise, which is why precalculated lighting is often a mandatory performance setting in most games. The ideal goal is to use the dedicated RT hardware in a way that achieves similar graphical results but with minimal performance loss (to transfer the CPU-bound option to something that can comfortably run on most average consumer GPUs).
Traditional Dynamic Lighting is definitely a good option to have for the user, though.
Some day we will have a cpu, gpu and a rtu. Need me a dedicated add in ray tracing card!