"Assassin's Creed: Shadow" is undoubtedly one of the best graphics games on PC at present.This is the first Assassin's Creed game that is comparable to Assassin's Creed: The Great Revolution in terms of light and shadow effects.This is mainly attributed to the implementation of Ray Trail Global Lighting (RTGI), as the game takes full advantage of RTGI.
Over the past few years, many people have been asking why developers are moving from rasterized pre-baked lighting to real-time ray tracing.Now, we finally get some explanation from the developers.Forget about the players who keep posting angry videos.Here are the reasons why more and more games will use real-time ray tracing (RTGI).
At this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), some behind-the-scenes data from Assassin's Creed Shadows were exposed, explaining why more and more game developers abandon traditional baked lighting in favor of real-time ray tracing.
In his speech on Assassin's Creed: Shadow, hosted by Ubisoft Nicolas Lopez, he reviewed the evolution of the series of games in Global Illumination technology.He pointed out that as the complexity of the game world continues to increase, the development team has to make more compromises between the picture and efficiency.For example, Assassin's Creed: The Revolution uses a stunning baking global lighting effect, thanks to the relatively small world of the game itself and no day and night changes.
If Assassin's Creed: Origins use the same method as The Revolution, then the lighting data alone would have to be 450GB, and baking those lighting would take 3 months.As the most complex game world in the series to date, Assassin's Creed Shadow will have 2TB of lighting data, and pre-baked lighting will take terrifying 2 years.This is why the development team chose to introduce ray tracing technology because it greatly simplifies the development process and becomes the direction of future development.
Despite this, due to the various configurations of PC players, Ubisoft still supports two global lighting solutions in Assassin's Creed: Shadow.But in the long run, they tend to turn to ray tracing technology in an all-round way.
In addition, the speech also disclosed the ray tracing performance of "Assassin's Creed: Shadow" on the console, PC (RTX 4080, Global Lighting RTGI) and PS5 Pro (Light Trail Reflection).
Due to the quarter resolution used when RTGI is turned on, the XSX is faster (4.30 ms vs 5 ms).XSS is even faster, but this is because the game uses a 900P internal resolution when running on this system, rather than the PS5 and XSX versions of 1440P.
As for ray tracing reflection, only PS5 Pro currently supports this feature, so it cannot be compared with other console versions.Comparing with the RTX 4080 graphics card also shows the expected performance gap.
