The Baking show

In Game graphics, everything that can be baked, should be baked.

~ Captain Honora

Have you first heard of raytracing 5 years ago, or 20 years ago? That would dictate your view of the technology, and what you imagine the point of it is.

When I first heard of raytracing, it was around 2004 with the first versions of blender. Before cycles was around, there was two choices of AO; approximate, or raytraced brute force. We’d spend hours , then later in the 2010’s minutes to calculate a single AO pass

Why lightmaps also make economical sense for gamedev.

Most devices that people already have that could play games are the ARM CPU GPUs in our phones. Or they are thin laptops without dedicated GPUs. Targeting a RTX 2060 as the min-spec means 80% of potential gamers won’t be able to run it.

Most of the cost of frames these days is lighting and shadows. Shadow maps essentially require re-rendering the entire scene from every shadow casting light’s perspective. We do this offline by raytracing to a lightmap texture. And we do it once, not per frame.