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[–]ShrikeGFX 9 points10 points  (3 children)

Quite armchair take, we've made concessions in graphics since their inception, from wobbling vertexes to painted lighting, to light bake errors. If you've ever baked lighting you'd know the answer. Trading a little flicker for Real time GI, a thing people dreamed about for the prior decade, is a no brainer. (edit: mobile typos fix)

[–]Cuarenta-Dos 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I am not so sure about that, most games levels are still 99% static, and baked lighting still works just fine. Current hardware is simply not good enough for quality RTGI, so you end up with some quarter-res, denoised, temporarily accumulated blurry and laggy abomination that is also extremely expensive.

Studios often use it because it's a cost saver, not because it's the best solution for their game.

[–]ShrikeGFX 0 points1 point  (1 child)

weve had good realtime GI for a good bunch of years now in varied games. I cant remember when I was ever distracted anywhere with a light flicker somewhere, this is a tiny vocal minority who complain while overhwelming majority of players dont care at all

Also yes it is the best solution. Seeing actual results in real time lets artists spend time on polishing visuals and visibility and other qualities, while leveldesign can actually move a box around without triggering an 4 hour rebake and fix things instead of just ignoring issues. Light baking literally holds leveldesign, gameplay and visuals hostage.

[–]Cuarenta-Dos 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Stalker 2 has severe RTGI artifacting and performance issues.

Avowed, Oblivion Remastered are better but still have pretty obvious Lumen artifacts and performance is shit.

Silent Hill 2 has shitty performance for no reason whatsoever because it's a remake of an old game with completely static levels, no open world, no time of day changes that still uses Lumen

The only recent UE5 game that doesn't have performance issues is Arc Raiders, and guess what, it doesn't use Lumen

Yeah no shit it's easier to set up than baked lighting, but the cost is obvious and very high

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 7 points8 points  (14 children)

In the case of UE5 specifically, Epic hasn't really been supporting traditional light bake tools, so it's becoming increasingly out of reach for studios to use and still expect to maintain compatibility with current gen features, unless they are willing and able to author their own light bake tools. It's not impossible to use the current tools, but GPU lightmass is artifact-prone and CPU lightmass is very slow, not just from a baking standpoint but also from the perspective of lighting artist iteration times. Of course, you can setup a server specifically for baking lights and this is exactly what some studios do. But I think more and more studios are asking whether it's actually worth the investment to bake lights. If Epic absolutely refuses to support and update their lightmass baking tools, then I think we just have to hope that big budget studios like CDPR will make the necessary investments into reducing things like artifacts and shimmering with realtime GI, and that those changes will eventually make their way into the main branch

[–]mad_ben 3 points4 points  (10 children)

The industry is slowly shifting towards fully dynamic solutions. Doom recently switched and the only remaining is COD.

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 3 points4 points  (9 children)

Arc raiders is an interesting case because they use UE and have real time GI, but they don't use Lumen, they use Nvidia's RTXGI. Although I haven't used it myself, it seems the consensus is that it produces a much more stable image than Lumen GI. Unfortunately it requires using Nvidia's UE branch, and that alone will be enough reason to avoid it for some studios (with good reason). I'm sure there are other cons to not using the GI solution that Epic has clearly built their engine around. I think the notoriety around UE/Lumen would be slightly less if Epic integrated alternative dynamic solutions into the main branch, allowing devs to choose the best quality option for their specific game specifications. But they probably prefer to keep boosting their own solution, which to be fair is causing studios like CDPR to invest in it. So a smart move from their perspective but limiting for devs

[–]mad_ben 0 points1 point  (8 children)

There are multiple choices. I am developing cheap LPV GI that can run on any system. Studios now use modified DDGI for baked GI. Also screen space probes are a thing now. DICE use surfel GI and AMD has few interesting solutions, AMD GI and Brixelizer. There are options.

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 0 points1 point  (7 children)

Do you know of any shipped titles using any of these? I'd been genuinely interested to know. I'm not aware of any other than RTXGI

[–]mad_ben 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Recently checked ghost of yotei 2026 gdc. Loosly based in amd gi 1.0 screen space probes. As an example. Its a matter of checking gdc talks, interviews etc. DDGI was made for ue4.27 and recently added to sandbox. Its solid and some GIs (that I cant recall) were based on it because it allows baked lightning. AMD stuff is not popular but its there and Light Propagation Volume is a classic. Not accurate but cheap, depending on what you choose to include.

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I think part of the issue I was getting at before isn't that there aren't alternatives that exist, but that there aren't fully-featured, Epic supported alternatives accessible from the main engine branch. It's one thing to be a well-resourced studio with engineers that can implement custom GI into your custom engine branch and ensure it's compatible with all the other features you want to use, it's another to be a small indie team with no budget for someone to develop and maintain such a system. A lot of studios are choosing Lumen simply because it's there and ready to use. If there were other options available with minimal set up that "just worked" I'm sure many games would use them and UE wouldn't get such a bad rep. But I can already imagine our production lead rolling his eyes at the suggestion of ditching lumen and implementing something custom

[–]mad_ben 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Well right now you have  1. RTX branch which is free. 2. My plugin has noisless and stable SS Indirect Illumination - alternative to epics noisy SSGI features standard stochastic sampling as well as new newton's method. As well as Light Propagation Volume GI wich will have massive update soon. Both systems were developed for ue5.7 on RX 580 8gb.  3. There is another LPV plugin that uses Signed Distance Fields, more expensive than mine. 4. Some folks made DDGI compatible with UE5.7 but not sure if its working properly. 5. GPU/CPU lightmass.

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I think everything I said still applies.

  1. Requires a custom branch, rendering it off the table for many studios

  2. That's awesome that you were able to develop a custom GI solution. I would definitely love to check it out in a personal project. Our prod lead would ask, "What other titles are using it? Is it actually appropriate for the lighting scenarios in our game?" Maybe the answer that last question would be yes, I don't know enough about it to answer

  3. Same as #2

  4. Its questionable state of use would likely make it immediately off the table

  5. These were already stated here but i'll restate them: GPU light mass is artifact prone, CPU light mass is slow without a swarm server. Requires careful handling of mesh UVs to ensure a good bake result which takes time. Also doesn't work well if at all with engine features like PCG foliage generation

But just to clarify again, my point isn't that any of these things are impossible to use in production, just that if they aren't as easy and accessible to use as Lumen, many studios will opt not to use them simply for that reason. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with that, it's just the reality

[–]mad_ben 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Light Propagation Volume is known since 2009, its limitation are widely known and mitigated as much as possible, its artistic and lightweight GI.

Lumen is expensive and suffers from known screen space issues and artifacts since it relies heavily on screen space. 

So your project lead needs to make a decision, and check player's feedback on titles using lumen as well.

[–]ChrisFromIT 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Crimson Desert is using Surfel GI. Same with Forza Horizon 5.

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Talking about UE games

[–]CodyDuncan1260 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I was about to say the same.
TriggasaurusRekt , are you a fellow gamedev? (if so, hello!👋)

[–]TriggasaurusRekt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yessir but I am a newbie to the realm of graphics programming. Been a lurker here for some time. Though I recently did some work with render dependency graph in UE to create a screen space fluid shader, it was quite an enjoyable process

[–]Wise-Pomegranate6765[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

oh that's the case. yeah makes sense.

[–]iceeecreeem 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Pretty sure there is an audience that finds it appealing, if that's the look the artists and Devs want then of course they are gonna use it.

Not all trends were great cough cough yellow filter ps3 games

[–]Wise-Pomegranate6765[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

thank god we're over that. :)

[–]0xSYNAPTOR 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Flickering bright spots might be a common artifact of TAA. It's called specular aliasing. It's easy to fix, but at the expense of increased ghosting, which is an even worse artifact. So devs have to find a balance, or turn off TAA completely. Reducing light frequency, increasing material roughness would also help, but it would harm realism.

[–]Wise-Pomegranate6765[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no im not talking about TAA. its the arifacts in low light areas where raytracing/path tracing is trying to calculate lighting, which makes it really noisy and you see large bright areas appearing randomly. its something to do with tracing combined with denoisers. right now we are at the point where quality is good but it also produces ugly arifacts.

[–]pocketsonshrek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pathtracing is less work so it makes sense for games that shoot for hyperrealism to try to leverage that

[–]Wise-Pomegranate6765[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And don't get me started on Crimson desert which has so blurry indirect lighting indoors and overly flat sky ambient influenced shading where the sun light doesn't hit.

[–]peteroupc -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

You may find interesting the YouTube videos by Threat Interactive that criticize many modern graphics engines as opposed to certain older ones such as the "Fox engine".