Bojji
Member
Why says you can't just made some parts of RTGI unrealistic?
Baked lighting can die in hell.
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Why says you can't just made some parts of RTGI unrealistic?
Baked lighting can die in hell.
simpatico
Gold Member
That's probably the best of both worlds, for me it's just the juice not being worth the squeeze yet. It doesn't serve consumers; it's a time save for developers and publishers. We're just paying for it.
ChiefDada
Member
Weird, I think Yotei has one of the best PSSR implementations. I haven't seen any shimmer. Also, have you tried the "Dramatic" contrast setting? I think it looks really good at least on my OLED.
Bojji
Member
RTGI is the thing that saves time, they lose hundreds of hours to bake lighting in games.
I think you can have realistic base (PBR, RTGI etc.) and always make things look better and more interesting than in reality.
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mrMUR_96
Member
I think you're missing /s or you have no idea what you're talking about.
simpatico
Gold Member
Post your best full-sun, mid-day pure RTGI screenshots.
mindfreak191
Member
Here ya go:*posts frog*
"mysteriously talks about unnamed 13 year old game"
Mindfreak:
Starts at 2:20s
viveks86
Member
What the what. All of this is completely wrong.
Did you know baked GI is simply a fixed approximation of RTGI? In fact, in many engines, baking quite literally performs RT or PT offline to create the light maps.
There is no artistic magic you can do in baking that you can't also do in RTGI. That's entirely up to the game's lighting and shading model. And if they really want stylized looks, that's achievable too. All of that is up to the devs. If they screwed up in-game evenings when you turn on RTGI, that's on them for how they chose to light the scene. Not the technique.
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darthkarki
Member
No need to watch gameplay. I've platinumed it and am currently in the middle of NG+. Put plenty of time in to fully appreciate its highs and lows. Still one of my favorite games to put on and just ride around the fields - it has some of the best vistas I've seen in a game yet.
Again, it's easy to cherry pick good or bad screenshots for any game. If you want a counterpoint, check out some of the screenshots in the OT:
Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. If you don't like it, you do you. I just think it's silly to dismiss what it does well (and better) and focus only on the lowest points you can possibly find.
Hard technical aspects are easy to show and compare. And I guess that's what this thread is for. But those are just parts of a whole - tools in service of an experience. And that is harder to show or explain. Yes, Shadows has higher poly models and fancier weather. And yet, it doesn't evoke the feelings Yotei does. It feels soulless and programmatically generated. Riding across the fields of Yotei I can slip into the fantasy of being a wandering mercenary. Playing Shadows, I feel like I'm playing a tech demo and checking items off a list.
I don't know man. There's just something about Yotei.
simpatico
Gold Member
They can add unnatural light sources. A second invisible sun to shade an area of a scene etc. There's nothing stopping someone from doing this with an RT game I guess. I just don't know that I've ever seen it. I think most publishers see it as a way to reduce their lighting labor budget.
I got a lot of text responses to my post, but still no full-sun, middle of the day RTGI screenshots.
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GymWolf
Member
Nobody expect nextgen character models\faces and animations from modern ubisoft, locations is where they shine.
Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
Yes, Yotei is not the best looking game ever made. But it deserves some actual fair screenshots.
viveks86
Member
Exactly. They can add whatever artificial lights they want that already exist in the baked version of the game. RTGI will simply calculate the necessary bounce lighting for it in realtime.
Lighting labor budgets have been higher because devs are still doing both, such as Yotei. RTGI has been a lazy bolt on as a result. Hopefully once baking is truly dead, we can expect environmental art and asset development to be done with RTGI/PT in mind.
You made an incorrect claim, but you are asking others to prove you wrong while not posting any evidence of your own. Which mid day RTGI looks worse than the corresponding baked version? Or are you comparing different games altogether and assuming RTGI is the reason?
simpatico
Gold Member
Yotei looks better at noon than Assassins Creed Shadows for my tastes. I came upon this opinion while playing the Oblivion remaster. Ray tracing does nothing for gamers. It saves the studios money. They could bake most that lighting and SSR to a very similar effect. Instead they're passing that cost on to us, and in many cases the overall art product isn't even superior than a well crafted raster world.
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Toots
Gold Member
Is it supposed to show yotei looks good or bad ?
I really can't make my mind up.
Funny how few shots you have outside of nature, when tsushima had numerous man made landscapes, in addition to nature.
Problem of yotei is that everything in it is underwhelming and highly forgettable compared to GoT. It is the equivalent of a quick cash grab sequel for a surprise movie hit. But at the same time those type of sequel would release very quick to capitalize on the original movie success, when they took their time with yotei. At least the cash grab aspect is still there, and instead of the audience for once it is the publisher who had to pay.
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GymWolf
Member
Yeah im sorry sorry but vanilla w3 doesnt look better than this.Yes, Yotei is not the best looking game ever made. But it deserves some actual fair screenshots.
ChiefDada
Member
Lol I thought they looked very good on my TV. As others have stated, Yotei is one of those games where it's highs are best experienced first-hand and in motion.
T4keD0wN
Member
I could argue that the devs are passing the cost on me with inflated install sizes by including prebaked lighting with their games, they also waste my internet bandwith with stuff i wont use.
They need to turn prebaked lighting into optional legacy dlcs like they do with texture packs and stop wasting our storage and internet bandwith.
Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
And huge bonus points to this game because they actually understand the importance of HUD REMOVAL.
look how fucking clean it is, thanks to no HUD. Pearl Abyss could learn a thing from Sucker Punch.
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Abysse
Member
And huge bonus points to this game because they actually understand the importance of HUD REMOVAL.
look how fucking clean it is, thanks to no HUD. Pearl Abyss could learn a thing from Sucker Punch.
Patch 1.13 added an option to hide the HUD.
simpatico
Gold Member
Lmao. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition removed ALL baked lighting and the file sized grew. What game were you talking about?
mrqs
Member
Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
Shame it took so long, zero interest in returning to that world anymore
The most basic on/off toggle and they literally fixed the entire game before adding such a basic/obvious feature
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viveks86
Member
That's comparing apples and oranges though. What you may be noticing is an issue of art, shading and/or lighting model than GI tech.
If RTGI is the one at fault, you will see it in games that have both options, where RTGI removes the baked GI altogether. Yotei is not a good candidate for that analysis as they use baked lighting and GI probes as a fall back even with RTGI on. And AC shadows has no baked GI at all, with or without RTGI. They fallback to software GI probes.
TW3 has some good comparisons here. Their RTGI implementation removes all baking and yet, RTGI is usually the same or better than baked GI in all cases.
Only if you want games to remain static forever. It's a shortsighted point of view. RTGI and path tracing pave the way for dynamic environments, real, continuous day/night cycles, more dynamic weather and destruction. If nothing is baked, all lighting can be calculated in realtime, which means everything can change every frame, if needed, and still look consistent. You could procedurally collapse entire buildings with unlimited states in between, or change seasons without making it all cost prohibitive to build, or ugly/inconsistent to look at. We are currently in a halfway house to get there. Once RTGI is mainstream and all the BVH bottlenecks are solved with solutions like DGF and megageometry, you will see game design gradually evolve to be a bit more ambitious.
That's not just a benefit to devs. It's a benefit to gamers too. These being mere bolt ons at the moment is a passing, maturing phase.
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simpatico
Gold Member
Metro Exodus did this too, and I don't think the results are impressive when you factor in the cost. It's not ugly, but I can't remember ever having to buy a new GPU for such a trivial addition. Look at the nighttime scenes especially. All that sweet rim lighting and color grading is replaced with nothing.
This was my point though; artistic lighting will almost always win. Yotei vs AC Shadows is the very essence of my position on the stuff in 2026. Assuming Yotei would run like GoT on PC, and I don't see anything to suggest that it wouldn't, the performance gap between it and AC Shadows is not trivial. I just don't see the benefit for the consumer yet.
Abysse
Member
mrMUR_96
Member
That's because it bundles all the dlc into one package and has upgraded 4k textures. Baked lighting has a big file storage impact, that's not even debatable.
simpatico
Gold Member
It's also true we've never seen that give us dividends in smaller file sizes. Good theory though.
mrMUR_96
Member
I'd agree Yotei has better overall art direction, but it's inferior in many ways to shadows and is massively inconsistent. They use a very limited and basic form of rtgi in yotei. Them not using RT well has nothing to do with the strength of their art direction, it just means it looks ass very often in indirectly lit areas.
simpatico
Gold Member
A lot of those gorgeous scenes are impossible without hand placed probes and whatnot. One big sun in the sky can only do so much.
T4keD0wN
Member
Prebaked content takes up space in all games that include it, every game could be smaller without it.
AC shadows would take up 2tb with prebaked lighting, it would also still be in development. Instead thanks to RT it takes up 147gb and it even fits on ps5/series x without forcing everyone to buy an ssd. Massive reduction in size in %.
Stuff like monster hunter wilds or crimson desert could easily go down by ~50gb had they went full rt (and max textures level only) i believe, installs should really be more modular.
Metro Exodus enhanced edition is a separate game from Metro Exodus, theres only 2gb difference in size while it has more languages along with 4k textures that the regular doesnt.
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GymWolf
Member
Funny that we had games like red faction guerrilla or mercenaries 2 with total destruction and no rtx, and modern games use heavy rtx that dont leave performance free for total destruction or devs just dont care about achieving total destruction...
I think destruction and a dynamic world is also more a core design of a game when it get designed more than being chained by the presence of rtx.
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Msamy
Member
One of things that made me really like laufey is the lighting system is identical between gameplay and cutscenes, I don't see those differences like other sony first party titles.
GymWolf
Member
Vick
Member
Fairly impressive Pro version. RT reflections in Performance mode (knew it
viveks86
, there was no way those could be cubemaps and SSR), which is a pretty big deal with the sea, hair strands, much better lighting somehow, and increased draw distance. Along with PSSR massive IQ improvement. Very nice job Ubisoft. Can't wait for the game.
Polygonal_Sprite
Member
Quick tech question if you don't mind. If baked lighting is an approximation of full RTGI then why are there still glowing objects in rooms in say AAA linear action games? Is it a matter of it taking more information thus data so increased file size for a better approximation of RTGI so they scale it back to get smaller file sizes? Is this also the reason AC Unity looks so good but is also a very large file size for it's time? Thanks.
Games that don't have RTGI look so dated already. Just taking PS2/3/4 games and adding in RTGI is absolutely transformative visually and takes years off their dated look. I think it will be a good way publishers will make money off older games and selling them as next gen PS6/Helix remasters.
viveks86
Member
This quite literally has nothing to do with RTGI. If they were missed, that's an artistic failure while changing out the scene lighting. Not the fact that indirect bounce occurs in realtime now.
Of course. But artistic lighting is not baked lighting. You can do artistic lighting with RTGI too. They are just 2 different techniques that can achieve whatever result the artist wants. Both baked lighting and RTGI mimic real world light physics. One is just frozen in space and time. RTGI is more fluid, like the real world. But does that mean all movies look the same with no rim lighting or color grading? That's a matter of an artistic touch. Like I said, you can throw in as much artificial lighting as you want to achieve the desired look with RTGI as well.
And we haven't even gotten to scenes that are completely impossible to replicate at scale with baked lighting. How would you fly a helicopter through a city that looks like the GIF below with SSR and GI bakes? What would even calculate the bounce lighting from the headlights of moving vehicles? You see how bright the cluster of vehicles are on the right early in the GIF and gets dim as they spread out? That's both direct and indirect light from each car adding up on the fly. And what about their occluded reflections on the buildings on either side? Now imagine scenes like this with dynamic destruction, or where you can affect the power grid or cause chaos on the streets.
Or something as simple as the Sun setting?
You will need to bake every frame, which will be as heavy as prerendering scenes, which will bloat the game to terabytes, cost a shit ton to develop and still not respond to state changes due to gameplay. It's quite literally impossible.
Without RTGI, you will get a bunch of post processing nonsense and lens flares to pretend light bounce is changing, while it really changes only a handful of times the entire day. Nothing can capture the true awe of it all happening in realtime.
Like I said, if you want game design and graphics to be stuck in one place forever, then baked lighting can stay as well. Otherwise, it needs to die.
viveks86
Member
Correct. Baking is done per scene (which is a compilation of all static assets) at a resolution that the dev may desire. Just like they create textures, baking would generate lightmaps for the entire scene that are loaded and overlayed on the assets (using lightmap UVs which also need to be generated and stored per asset) during runtime. For modern games, this is nowhere near the resolution of the assets themselves. So even if the asset has 4K textures, the lightmaps are typically much lower resolution. And because of the lower resolution, there will be lighting inaccuracies even in static scenes. The moment anything even moves a pixel, if there isn't a separate bake for the new state, you end up with light leakage.
I believe GTA 6 is using a combination of RTGI, a new patented technique using "bounce maps" and probe based lighting. They are tuning this to each specific scene. I'm finding several scenes where there is no RTGI at all for dynamic objects, NPCs or even Jason/Lucia in the previous trailers and others that have it. Will comment more on that after seeing how trailer 3 does it all, as this stuff can evolve with development.
AC Unity is a great example. Another would be those rooms that you walk around in UC4 or TLOU or all of Order 1886. Extremely high baking resolution that makes it look almost path traced. But extremely large file sizes, and as a result, impossible to use in larger spaces or changing light conditions. They would generally not even allow much interactivity as flipping the object over would show that lightmaps don't exist in other angles. Baked lighting always forces devs to keep the environmental assets non-interactive. The more interactivity, the less baking. And the less baking, the shittier the assets look. It's why in the previous gen, there is a wide gap between cutscenes and gameplay. When you can't predict the way bounce lighting is supposed to hit an object due to change in viewing angle or lighting, without RTGI, you have to come up with some crude approximation. You can get away with fake lighting in cutscenes, but they would look out of place and impact performance in gameplay. For games like GoW, they just don't do any approximation at all as there is no dynamic bounce lighting. If there is no direct light, it will simply not be lit.
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Msamy
Member
Yes, forgot about HFW gameplay and cutscenes looks very close, but this when guerrilla care about graphics on even cross gen title instead of their current cartoon graphics interestWas horizon much worse litten outside of cutscenes?
GymWolf
Member
The gaas horizon is just a sideproject.
The only good thing about having helmet at the driver seat, is that he is not gonna give horizon 3 a measly 60 mil budget, it is his creature after all.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
This. Ive seen plenty of RTGI games that have ps3 era lighting. Yes, its more accurate in terms of light bounce, and darkening of shadowed areas, but it cant magically fix something that doesnt have a high quality base. Yotei is the perfect example of this. Dying Light as well. Just an ugly brownish ps3 era color palette. you even see this in some UE5 games with lumen. Some games just look better than others. hell compare Avowed to Outer Worlds 2 and its like a generational difference in lighting.
the fact that HFW still has the best lighting out of all the other sony games is proof that a better base, baked or otherwise, is needed first and foremost. You can then start adding multibounce RTGI, better PBR materials, ray tracing, and volumetric effects, but the base has to be better.
Put the following games next to HFW and they all still dont measure up 4 years later.
- GOW Ragnorak
- TLOU1
- Spiderman 2
- Death Stranding 2
- GHost of Yotei
- Saros
- Wolverine
Jason confirmed the entire studio was working on it. Horizon 3 is on the backburner with maybe a small team of writers working on it like Cory's game which had just 5 writers for 4 years until they shipped ragnorak.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
lol the cherry picking excuse. i have posted over a dozen screenshots. from the main missions to just exploring the first area of the game. every game can be cherrypicked yes. Ive said numerous times that HFW looks next gen 50% of the time. Avatar over 65% since the last area looks like pure garbage. AC Shadows i would put around 80% because of the autumn season. But this game ooks like garbage 90% of the time. And it NEVER looks next gen. Not even 10% of the time. At its best it looks like an early gen PS4 game.
Anyway, im not going to spam the thread with dozens of Yotei shots just how consistently awful it looks. But ive compiled them all in this one album on imgur. You can see just how terrible the game looks here.
Or just keep clicking on the left to see one bad screenshot after another.
GymWolf
Member
Did DF praised this one aswell?
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Of course. it was even included in their Best of 2025 list over KCD2. The video was called a triumphant sequel. John waxed lyrical about it like he had just sampled sydney sweeney's tits.
just tried the dramatic contrast setting. i dont like how it darkens the grass foliage so turned it off.
the game looks so much better at native 4k. i am pretty sure the base 1080p resolution in the RT pro mode is adding artifacts especially during motion and using low res effects that look like crap. i didnt notice the artifacts and shimmering at first, but then i started wearing this outfit that was shimmering everywhere when riding the horse. then i began noticing that motion blur didnt work well with pssr on grass either. and now im noticing that even when standing still, the vistas look much better and the fog and other volumetric effects no longer look like garbage.
there are still a lot of the same issues like the trees below that couldve been solved by rt distant shadows similar to what insomniac added for spiderman 2's Pro version. but i can finally start to see what you and others are seeing in terms of art direction now thats its not a muddy mess.
Vs What its supposed to look like:
viveks86
Member
Agreed. They have some artificial lighting, but those seem to exist in gameplay as well. Nothing special being done in cutscenes other than moving the camera around. This makes it a good candidate for PT, as they wouldn't have to re-light the game from scratch. I think most cross gen games will take this route when they have RTGI in place. They could simply remove the bakes, if any, and let the existing light setup do all the work with additional bounces for PT.
In many ways, the GoW reboot had forced them to limit differences between cutscenes and gameplay. There is no camera cut, so that severely restricts the lighting tricks they can get away with. They can't teleport characters to different spots, or turn on/off any obvious lights that don't already exist in the scene. And Laufey is one step further in this direction with RTGI.
Of course. it was even included in their Best of 2025 list over KCD2. The video was called a triumphant sequel. John waxed lyrical about it like he had just sampled sydney sweeney's tits.
just tried the dramatic contrast setting. i dont like how it darkens the grass foliage so turned it off.
the game looks so much better at native 4k. i am pretty sure the base 1080p resolution in the RT pro mode is adding artifacts especially during motion and using low res effects that look like crap. i didnt notice the artifacts and shimmering at first, but then i started wearing this outfit that was shimmering everywhere when riding the horse. then i began noticing that motion blur didnt work well with pssr on grass either. and now im noticing that even when standing still, the vistas look much better and the fog and other volumetric effects no longer look like garbage.
there are still a lot of the same issues like the trees below that couldve been solved by rt distant shadows similar to what insomniac added for spiderman 2's Pro version. but i can finally start to see what you and others are seeing in terms of art direction now thats its not a muddy mess.
Vs What its supposed to look like:
Yeah I couldn't tell the difference between native 4k and pro mode after disabling motion blur. That was the main culprit. And I agree with RT shadows. It would be a sin next gen if they can't cover the 3 core pillars at least, if not PT. GI, shadows and reflections.
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Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
I love the level of hate
SlimySnake
has for Yotei actually
Need more of this energy towards Team Ninja
SlimySnake
has for Yotei actually
Need more of this energy towards Team Ninja
Trilobit
Absolutely Cozy
That hair looks awful.Meanwhile Ghosts:
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
hair, trees, water, reflections, tree leaves, rocks. the only thing good in that screenshot is that 2d billboard mountain in the distance which looks 3d.
this is why i defend shadows despite its shortcomings. they invested in hair physics, great looking water, rt reflections, incredible physics based tree leaves, great looking physics based weather effects, and virtualized geometry for rocks and other non-foliage objects. at the end of the day, no open world game will always look great, but their investment in these different technologies helps them look far more consistent than other open world games.
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