Bullshit. Dynamic objects and characters will still look bad with baked lighting.
they also look bad with RT GI, just a different kind of bad.
with static GI they can look badly lit.
with current RT GI they can create obvious ghosting and can have obvious slow light reaction
Hardware lumen is stable enough most of the time, software version is the problem.
that is absolutely not true, and in some titles the opposite is true in fact. in Ninja Gaiden 2 Black hardware Lumen is less stable than software lumen, and both look absolutely disgusting.
Lumen breaks entirely in specific scenarios, especially in enclosed rooms with multiple light sources and semi-dim lighting.
I prefer lower fidelity visuals over broken visuals. even if the broken ones can look nicer in still images.
You also have games like Indiana Jones and Metro that have very stable hardware RTGI.
yes, but that doesn't change the fact that in a game that doesn't need real time GI, it's a waste of GPU resources that could be used to improve visuals in other ways.
the big issue with RT GI, and RT in general, is that it rapidly degrades in quality the lower the internal resolution is. so the harder you push RT, the lower the internal resolution needs to be to keep the same performance target.
this means it has a degrading effect on performance and image quality, while also itself looking worse and worse with the dropping resolution.
Software lumen is used because console RT hardware is weak, but this doesn't explain why many games don't have hardware lumen switch on pc...
Hardware Lumen is not much better. it has almost the exact same issues.
ghosting, boiling, slow reaction to changes, highly reliant on screen space information, bad performance compared to even much higher quality competitors.
the only valid use of RT GI is when it's absolutely necessary to the scope of the game. be it highly dynamic environments, dynamic weather and time of day, or when baking isn't viable due to scale, like in Doom The Dark Ages.
Space Marine 2 doesn't fall into any of these categories. neither do many UE5 games that use Lumen.
Robocop, Silent Hill 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Expedition 33. none of them need Lumen, all of them would look better without it in many ways.
Lumen is primarily used as a shortcut, not as something that actually enhances visuals beyond what is possible with baked GI.
