We all remember Assassin's Creed Unity and how much praise the lighting got?
Looking good! That was done by placing lighting probes & using baked lighting. The game didn't have a huge world, around 4 square km and 4 times of day, that lighting data took around 15gb of disc space.
Now the devs had a tech talk and revealed what using such a system for AC Shadows with it's way larger world would look like.
It would mean:
1.9 TB of data for the lighting
Baking time for the lighting of 624 days
=
absolutely not feasible
Real time ray tracing enables devs to increase the scale of the world and at the same time the quality of the visuals, while using less data and saving a ton of time.
id Software devs also talked about how using RT saved around one year of development time while increasing the quality of the art & design because they were able to immediately iterate instead of having to approximate and bake each scene before seeing the changes.
Interestingly enough, this also means great times ahead for the quality of smaller games. That's something we've already seen happening with Lumen in UE5, enabling high qualiy games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being made by a small team. Using traditional rendering would take way too much time and UE5 enables lighting changes in real time thanks to RT.
RT will bring more power to smaller and mid sized studios because it'll destroy the resource barrier that was there with traditional lighting. It took so much of their time, while larger studios had dedicated teams working on it, creating this gap in quality. Which has been destroyed and we'll see better and better results with an increasing adoptions rate from devs. The playing field has been leveled in regards to lighting.

Looking good! That was done by placing lighting probes & using baked lighting. The game didn't have a huge world, around 4 square km and 4 times of day, that lighting data took around 15gb of disc space.
Now the devs had a tech talk and revealed what using such a system for AC Shadows with it's way larger world would look like.
It would mean:
1.9 TB of data for the lighting
Baking time for the lighting of 624 days
=
absolutely not feasible
Real time ray tracing enables devs to increase the scale of the world and at the same time the quality of the visuals, while using less data and saving a ton of time.
id Software devs also talked about how using RT saved around one year of development time while increasing the quality of the art & design because they were able to immediately iterate instead of having to approximate and bake each scene before seeing the changes.
Interestingly enough, this also means great times ahead for the quality of smaller games. That's something we've already seen happening with Lumen in UE5, enabling high qualiy games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being made by a small team. Using traditional rendering would take way too much time and UE5 enables lighting changes in real time thanks to RT.
RT will bring more power to smaller and mid sized studios because it'll destroy the resource barrier that was there with traditional lighting. It took so much of their time, while larger studios had dedicated teams working on it, creating this gap in quality. Which has been destroyed and we'll see better and better results with an increasing adoptions rate from devs. The playing field has been leveled in regards to lighting.