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Real time RT really is meh, but I like what they're doing in CS2. Prebaked Global Illumination looks freaking fantastic.
It only works in CS tho. Because the maps are always the same
I might be wrong, but even for games like Cyberpunk 2077 there is a finite set of world states that define lighting conditions (time of day weather etc.).
So prebaking lighting information for all these combinations and then figuring out a way to create transitions between them would maybe not be the perfect representation, but best of both worlds.
However, given how fast RayTracing improves hardware-wise, in my opinion it would make no sense to even consider researching and developing a solution of that kind.
The problem with prebaked is you can't have dynamic effects show up with the same quality as the prebaked light maps. Think of a car driving down the road or an explosion. I think ray tracing is great and in 5 more years when GPUs and game development has advanced further it will become the standard.
Totally agree on that. When the first generation RTX cards launched, I was pretty sure that it was just going to be another gimmick like PhysX, but today, it's an inevitable future.
I'm not really sure how PhysX was a gimmick. It had a weird implementation due to hardware restrictions initially, but is still used today on your bog standard GPS.
It's actually a great example of a tech that had this weird transition period at first, when the hardware wasn't advanced enough to support it by default, and is now just a standard tool to make games look great on average hardware.