sounds about right from my personal experience. 40% of devs actually go out of their way to carefully design the lighting around it, and tweak lighting resolutions to get acceptable frame rates. the other 60% throw it in for marketing.

Edit: alright i have watched this video more and have more detailed thoughts. Many are pointing out that HUB used somewhat cherry-picked samples in this case, and they have a history of presenting RT in an unfavorable light (no pun intended). Now that I am thinking about it, I can see that a few of their samples are cases where the RT lighting produces softer, more realistic shadows or reflections, but Steve says the non-RT image looks better because the shadows or reflections look “sharper”. Idk, they weren’t that egregious, but it does give a weird vibe.

Regardless, I hope people don’t look at this and go “wow I guess RT is pointless then!”. The title of the vid suggests that we’ve had 6 years of RT with little to show for it, but I think I disagree. Part of the problem is that AAA game dev times are LOOOOONG, and devs are using engines from before the RT renaissance that they are comfortable with using. Accordingly, they stick with lighting techniques that they are familiar with, rather than trying to learn a new workflow. Combine that with the fact that the majority of gamers are still using last-gen consoles or 1080ti’s, and so devs have to use the old method of lighting to ensure that they can reach a viable audience. In that case, RT is a bonus feature that requires extra work on top of building the pre-baked lighting model.

We’re starting to see more UE5 games with “software” RT from Lumen, and these look great and can run smoothly on current-gen consoles. But even if the difference can be hard to see, the point is that RT lighting lets devs automate lighting in a lot of cases where previously they had to hand-place every lighting source. So moving to an RT future will mean that dev costs will go down, and smaller teams will be able to produce more visually-stunning games. It’s just that we’re in this weird limbo right now, where devs don’t want to go to only RT because a majority of gamers won’t be able to play the game, but gamers don’t want to get next-gen consoles because to their eyes, the graphics look basically the same. And of course they do, because devs are destroying themselves to make the pre-baked lighting look almost as good as RT.