It's not so much about the light affecting a texture, it's about the texture informing the lighting what to do, a torch will still be a "static" light with parameters that inform how the light should act in order to mimic a fire. Textured area lights do the opposite, the texture is the light so to speak, this allows them to mimic moving light sources like a screen that's playing dynamic content with lighting that's perfectly in sync with the dynamic content that's being played.
Watch those videos I linked. In ND games it's not about the light source, but how every texture and shader reacts to light bounce from other assets.
Again, not about the assets being lit by a source (and flames aren't fixed either, they change in instensity) but how they change based on the bounced characteristics of other assets. You make one step the entire scene changes, in terms of light, color, everything, based on what asset of what color is lit by the source.
I unfortunately have bad examples at hand due to lack of colorful assets, will see if I can provide some where it's more apparent.
Spider-Man 2 is fully featured game with quests, enemy ai and a lot of shit going on vs. tech demo where there is nothing like that - just pretty graphics. CDPR said that current UE5 won't work with open world game like CP so they decided to improve it:
Didn't know having more game systems made such a drastic difference. Thought RoboCop looked and ran great on PS5, but sure, wasn't a true open world.
It's one light source. This demo shows hundreds. Each casting its own dynamic shadows. The whole point of the flying bots demo towards the end was to basically show that you can have hundreds of flashlights each casting its own shadow.
Totally agree, that's what really impressed me.
I simply didn't find the textured area lights as impossibly impressive, as from a visual perspective was kind of playing with similar looking stuff already in the original TLOU on PS3.
Shadows are extremely expensive on PC. I can get somewhere between a 25-35% performance improvement just switching from ultra to medium shadows in games like starfield and wukong. And they feature fairly basic light sources. Either sun shadows with some lights or torches here and there. this will allow devs to make their games more dynamic. Something we dont get because it kills performance.
Shadows are extremely expensive
everywhere. Always have been.
This is why RT shadows are possibly my favorite RT feature. These my posts in the previous page:
Looks good, very promising.
To be honest wasn't really impressed initially, until those shadows, realizing nothing's baked.
I am certainly glad this sort of stuff can now be easily implemented by everyone, but I found the engine being able to handle all those real-time lights with shadows on top considerably more impressive.