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Manually placed lights and baking not only takes time away from iteration but also takes a lot of disk space for the shadow maps. RT makes development faster for the artists, I think DF even mentioned that doing Doom Eternal without RT would take so much disk space it wouldn’t be possible to ship it.

edit: not Doom Etenral, it’s Doom The Dark Ages, the latest one.

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The quoted number was in the range of 70-100 GB if I recall correctly, which is not that significant for modern game sizes. I’m sure a lot of people would opt to use it as an option as a trade off for having 2-3x higher framerate. I don’t think anyone realistically complains about video game lighting looking too “gamey” when in a middle of an intense combat sequence. Why optimize a Doom game of all things for standing still and side by side comparisons? I’m guessing NVidia paid good money for making RT tech mandatory. And as for shortened development cycle, perhaps it’s cynical, but I find it difficult to sympathize when the resulting product is still sold for €80

Devs get paid either way, consumers just pay for more dev waiting instead of more game.

You still have to manually place lights. Where do you think the rays come from (or rather, go to).

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