In September 2023, Scans Factory released a pretty cool tech demo for Unreal Engine 4, called Abandoned Warehouse. That demo had amazing pre-baked lighting using traditional methods, and it did not use Ray Tracing or Path Tracing. So, earlier this month, Scan Factory ported the tech demo to Unreal Engine 5, using Lumen and Nanite. And, as you will see, this tech demo is the perfect example of why UE5 can actually harm games and demos that use incredible pre-baked lighting.
But how do we know that this tech demo did not use Ray Tracing in UE4? Well, this is coming straight from the dev team. As Scans Factory said when asked about whether this pack is compatible with Path Tracing.
“There were no special preparations for Path-Tracing. To be honest I’m not sure what could be useful special for that.”
Not only that but a UE4 game with Ray Tracing cannot run as fast as what you’re about to see at Native 4K on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080. So yes, the UE4 version of this tech demo used traditional rasterized techniques.
So, as we can see in this comparison video, the NVIDIA RTX 4080 can run the UE4 version of the tech demo with 120-190fps at Native 4K. On the other hand, the UE5 version (which supports Lumen and Nanite) runs with 30-48fps. Ouch.
Now the big issue here is that the pre-baked lighting was so good in the UE4 version that there are only minor visual differences between the UE4 and the UE5 builds. And this right here shows why a lot of us loved pre-baked lighting in older games.
With pre-baked lighting, developers can make their scenes look amazing, almost as good as if they used Path or Ray Tracing. That’s why games like The Last of Us Part 2, Uncharted 4, and Assassin’s Creed Unity still look great in 2024. But when developers started using full dynamic time-of-day (TOD) systems, the quality dropped.
To put it simply, the tech wasn’t ready yet when the devs started using full dynamic TOD systems. This is the area that Ray Tracing/Path Tracing can greatly improve. With Ray Tracing, games using a full dynamic TOD system can finally match the visuals of games that used pre-baked lighting. That’s why Ray Tracing/Path Tracing are so important.
Now, if the UE5 version was not using Lumen but relied on the UE4’s standard lighting pipeline, it would be running almost as well as its previous version. So, the problem is not UE5. The performance culprit here is Lumen (which as I’ve said numerous times is a form of Ray Tracing, so it has very high GPU requirements).
In conclusion, games with great pre-baked lighting won’t suddenly look better when developers remaster them using UE5 with Lumen or Ray Tracing. However, games with poor traditional lighting will definitely look better with Lumen. So, Ray Tracing can improve a bad-looking game. But games that already look amazing won’t get much better with Ray Tracing, Path Tracing, or Lumen. Instead, they will look the same but run a lot slower.
That’s also how Ray Tracing and Lumen can make game development faster. Instead of spending a lot of time carefully adjusting every scene, devs can use Ray Tracing as an all-in-one solution. This way, they can achieve amazing image quality in their scenes more quickly.
This is a topic I always wanted to touch and this video was the perfect excuse to write this article. So, there you go!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Very true, there's a good reason Cyberpunk 2077 (with its dynamic time-of-day and shiny buildings) is used by Nvidia as a testbed for RTX, it makes the difference in RTX ON vs RTX OFF look much bigger than it would be in most other games.
uncharted 4 begs for ray tracing . it can dramatically improve that game .every inch is just better with path tracing or a great ray tracing .most games really suffer form not having ray tracing .imagine bioshock games with path tracing .man its much better with rt in almost every game .
"With pre-baked lighting, developers can make their scenes look amazing, almost as good as if they used Path or Ray Tracing. That’s why games like The Last of Us Part 2, Uncharted 4, and Assassin’s Creed Unity still look great in 2024."
Why TLOU is considered great looking has always been lost on me.
the lighting in TLOU (both 1 and 2) is super flat and I would never consider it good.
It was good for a console.
I think on a technical level the last of us 1 and 2 are very competent. It's just that the setting and the focus on realism makes it visually unappealing IMO.
You need to consider it's running on laptop hardware from 2011, it also has a lot of granular detail.
>harm
What harm? Who doesn't want to use pre-baked lighting will not use it.
FPS mostly.
FPS get a kick in the gonads
I think he means by looking so much better than prebaked lighting.
UE 4 much smoother. the changes are minimal tbh. they should just keep making games on 4 instead of 5.
Actually they should stop making in UE, the over reliance of single core and inability to effectively precompiled shader have been the source of many problems on PC game
Hahahahaha! I've always been saying this. Still I'm. I don't like Ray tracing the way it's infesting videogames. It hampers artist's vision. There's a reason why traditional pre-baked lighting is used. It's superior while also performing way faster and achieves the original concept design.
That's why chad 💪RE4 remake looks tons better than geh Alan woke 🤏
You have stoped saying this recently
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/dbd881e9e4c6ca4b529b758cbc410716425bed3186723d0baf2c6f25b87e2aff.gif
Mgs delta would like to have…Snakes 😉
Real-time ray tracing should be used as a tool. Not solely relied upon.
While they're at it, they should redo the demo in the latest Unreal Engine 3 version, in DX11.
Hyper realistic body-cam FPS have all failed.
VR that promised total immersion also failed.
The best selling platform is a potato Nintendo switch.
The best selling game is Zelda using cell shading.
This idea that people want raytraced, or hyperrealistic graphics, is very questionable.
If you look at other media, people reject hyperrealistic lighting. Movies use dramatic lighting, color filters, and artistic license, none of them strive for realism. Professional ARRI cameras are loved because they have a certain look, footage from a regular smartphones looks horrible in comparison, even though it might be more realistic. Hyperrealism is not what people want to consume.
The best-selling platform is indeed the Nintendo Switch, yet Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is not the best-selling game; it has sold 20 million copies according to Nintendo's last report in March.
In comparison, the best-selling game of all time is Minecraft, with over 300 million sales. Even FIFA has sold more copies than Zelda, which is expected since it consistently tops the charts in the UK and EU annually, regions passionate about football.
Staying within Nintendo's realm, the Pokémon franchise has sold significantly more than the Zelda franchise as a whole.
If you're arguing about the best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch, you're still off the mark, as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe holds that title with 70 million sales.
And your argument overlooks the fact that the majority of Nintendo Switch owners also possess other gaming platforms.
i am tired right now to notice the difference, but i did not ice the huge framerate drop, no thanks ill stick to prebaked shadows.
UE is bloated stuttering mess, because it's a Jack of all trades, master of none. It's meant to cater to every type of game, so you end up with a bloated mess that's not good at anything.
Asobo, Ubisoft, ID, they're all better engines, they have been custom built for a type of game.
Expect this to become the norm over time for games made in UE5, especially from smaller studios.
In fact, UE5's Lumen is the reason why Valve has ramped up investments into maximizing ray-tracing performance out of AMD's RDNA2 GPU architecture, which has severe hardware limitations.
Still, expect significant performance improvements over time, to the point where it's going to consistently beat AMD's official Vulkan driver implementation…
They should have showed UE4 v UE5 v RTX pathtracing.
Remember kiddies, prebaked lighting means boring static worlds.
its actually fine depends on the game, beside Arkham Knight still looks better than many games of today with latest tech
Other than CP2077 and AW2, what other games have the latest tech?
Starfield, many UE5 games like HellBlade 2, Aveum, Robocop, etc, that Avatar games, Plague Tale, etc
Starfield? WTF are you smoking?
I’ve not played any of the other games you listed but I think Robocop was UE4 so static worlds again. Plague Tale only had RT shadows hence the flat look. Avatar again went light weight on tech, a missable FarCry game. Hellblade 2 appear to be more of a cinematic experience rather than a game so pre-rendered? Maybe you are used to console graphics?
I’m looking forward to Black Myth: Wukong.
Robocop is UE5
Just tried Avatar which does looks good although the reflections aren’t great. I forgot it uses the Snowdrop 2 engine. Shame they didn’t put the same effort in to Starfield’s visuals.
lol. Probably they couldn’t cause the engine is so old. Well, maybe that’s not fair. Modders added it to Quake afterall.
They couldn’t/ Starfield uses an ancient engine that couldn’t support these new rendering techniques. Bethesda is in for a big suprise if they don’t start learning to use a new engine. They should move over to idTech since they own it.
OK, who are you, and what have you done with John?
My immediate thought. "Wait, what?!"
more proof the only reason ray trace is thing, is so gfx hardware companies can sell their hardware at a55rape levels
I wouldn't call the visual ( lighting) difference minor. Though the performance difference is a bit much.
The way things are progressing soon Windows OS will be running on UE….
Its like dejavu with the toy car video while back that looks better when RT Off
Wish we could get back to a reasonable normalcy before the whole push for RT insanity existed.
You "people" need an awakening to say the least. Comparing an engine that's been around for practically over twenty years to a brand new cutting edge engine on today's hardware!?!?! So damn stupid.
"My frames are abysmal with these settings!!!" Because it's a NEW engine pushing the NEWEST technology and hardware to its limits!
GTFO and go back to the rocks you lived under once again please!
What this article ignores is that pre baked lighting is massivly labor intensive. its a major factor of games becoming so expensive. True RTGI is amazing regardless what this piece says. There's nothing that matches 2077 or Alan Wake 2 in their full glory.
What this article ignores is that in games using prebaked lighting, any dynamic objects (characters, pickups, physics objects etc.) in the scene will not get any of the benefit of baked lighting and will therefore have to rely on other more primitive solutions that can often make them stand out against the amazing looking static backgrounds.
With raytracing, dynamic objects are run through the exact same lighting pipeline as everything else, which will make them look just as good as everything surrounding them. This is a big reason why Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 look so damn good in addition to the time of day changes outlined here.
this article also ignores the realtime reflections that raytracing can achieve, which is a huge boost in games with a lot of shiny surfaces such as metal, glass and water. Screenspace reflections can do a decent job to simulate it, but it has some pretty severe limitations built into it.
In conclusion: yes, baked lighting can look very close to as good as ray/path tracing as long as it is a very static game with few dynamic objects and few reflective surfaces – like in this demo. In most real game scenarios though, RT will look way better overall, which is why everyone is striving towards it.
Say you no absolutely nothing about the tech behind this, development, or the industry at large a little louder. This is an embarrassing article. You should be embarrassed
Ah yes, a group of gamers claiming to know about lighting technology. Ignorance is bliss.
When the lowest common denominator catches up, this will be an irrelevant point of contention. An advancement is still an advancement; the whole point of UE5 is to make lighting solutions easier from the engine doing the calculations, therefore avoiding development time using baked-in lighting. Even so, this is the best-case scenario and doesn't represent all baked-in lighting—for better or worse. Even if it isn't major, the advancements UE5 has to offer cumulatively make for a big deal. Eventually, technology will run this without problems once the kinks are worked out, and in the PC GPU space, that happens pretty quickly. It wasn't too long ago that 4k was deemed a huge hurdle, and I'd argue nativley that it may still be that (albeit to a lesser extent now) but with insane upscaling has been irrelivant. This is arguably the biggest move conpared to 4k as lighting has sometimes let games down. Again, the man hours to even remotley match Raytracing is a nightmare that can be avoided by this engine.
Aside from the extra reflections in the puddles, the only difference I noticed is the FPS drop. Lol. 140 down to 45. Damn!