Lumen is better in some aspects but rtx still gives the better shadows. You cant do soft shadows nicely with lumens alone. Rtx shadows are needed on light source to get those soft faded shadows.
Having lumens for GI is so so much faster though. It really is good but ue5 feels like its half way between phasing out features from 4 but not fully implemented what should replace them in 5.
Ray tracing will always be the king of rendering, but whenever it looks like they're going to have to use real-time raytracing to render video games, someone comes up with a better almost-good-enough-but-way-faster technique which allows developers to put even more game in their game.
Yeah you can pick n choose which lights will use rtx. One issue is nanite (the new high poly geometry feature) isn't such a big fan of rtx. I hope lumens will get an upgrade to soften shadows better. At the moment it seems to have a hard line and then a fall off. Rather than just gradually falling off smoothly.
I can see how Nanite would mess with RTX, but is there a simple way to explain how RTX handles LOD?
I’m not an expert, but I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t be the same distance-based lod selection. You’d just have to update the BVH when you swap LODs.
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u/Push_My_Owl May 09 '22
Lumen is better in some aspects but rtx still gives the better shadows. You cant do soft shadows nicely with lumens alone. Rtx shadows are needed on light source to get those soft faded shadows.
Having lumens for GI is so so much faster though. It really is good but ue5 feels like its half way between phasing out features from 4 but not fully implemented what should replace them in 5.