Enlighten looked like a misstep even before it was released. It’s completely useless for many types of games. Realtime GI is doable (other engines have been doing it for years)… Unity just prefers to partner and buy other solutions and position themselves as a technology company rather than strictly a game engine company. This comes with benefits and tradeoffs, one tradeoff being the inattention to things like REAL realtime GI.
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This is all that matters.
It is pretty much as good as it gets in terms of performance.
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Still blown away by 0.6ms at 4k on an Xbox One X
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Unity can make a big step forward in bringing this onboard. Over to you guys, what you going to give us?
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Oh … @hippocoder
I didn’t meant to to crap on your excitement for the issues, it was just an offhand remark, which wan’t what you expected therefore I clarified what I meant, it don’t feel like I undermine the issue …
BUT, I don’t see how it’s different from Lexie’s, it’s basically a slide that say it works for them, and explain how they did it in loose terms for people knowledgeable to try custom implementation. Just like lexie’s released proof, video and explanation that work on his machine … WHAT I DON’T SEE or have, is actual code I can download on my machine to verify the claim and study… just like Lexie’s.
BUT I can download Nigiri wip version on the discord…
So it will be production ready when code will be on the wild and everyone can try for itself. It’s easy to get excited at hypothetical, that’s why you people like to tease me when I’m talking about advance tech™ potential lol 
It’s just one more proposition to try and implement.
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I’m pretty sure Gaijin Entertainment, who have released almost a game a year for the past 14 years, including War Thunder, a game that is designed to be performant on a wide range of hardware, is on the level.
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I’m just saying, it works, but show me the code now.
THEY have something WE have nothing.
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No, we have a breakdown over the course of 49 slides, some of which include relevant code samples. Gaijin is not a company that does open source releases and they have given a quite profound amount of information here.
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I know you’re not beating on me neo <3 but I was afraid you might give people the impression this thing is a negative. It’s really all we got left before a raytraced world.
And I can’t blame Unity for wanting to dodge this in favour of just focusing on raytracing (it’s the easy way out) but even Unity is first to admit that raytracing is not all or nothing, and has a huge few years to go before being optimal and that’s basically the entire planet almost, that could benefit from the Gaijin approach, an approach they freely shared with us.
It does take a few developers and a commitment to put together, but isn’t that why we pick Unity? Enlighten will not scale with dots. Enlighten continues to be a bottleneck in the Unity pipeline, and frankly Unity can even dodge the whole lightprobe/multiple scene/streaming bullet just by using this.
Suspect this is faster:
GDC Realtime GI (Voxel magic stuff)
Than:
Post Effect AO + Lightprobes + streaming enlighten ligntmaps + Additive Scene Loading + Patching up probe leaks
+Horrid editor bake time + authoring probes + getting pissed off at clustering + fiddling endlessly with GI Params…
Remember, we’re not actually comparing 0ms cost to 0.6ms.
We’re probably comparing something that costs 0.6-1 ms (A combo of AO/probes/enlighen/etc) to 0.6ms. It’s very likely on modern setups with large levels, that Enlighten will be slower as well as being lower resolution (you need a cripplingly low res to handle open world, it just doesn’t scale at all).
Also perf is bad sometimes:
Currently enlighten hits my profiler in a build with 50ms spikes. Why? because procedural sky dared to move and this triggered readbacks and other eye-rolling shenanigans. Enough, it’s 2019 not 2004.
Until then what will light megacity 2.0?
PS. speaking of which, I tried Enlighten on my level before popping back here. I used the terrain style conservative very low res params. After making a tea, I got back to see:
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I wanted to vote Yes, but only options on poll were: Yes, yes and yes. So I chose the closest one which was Yes.
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@hippocoder You are right, i’m coming off as more negative than I want to be, so I’ll rephrase my take in a way thar=t’s way more positive:
You can have this very soon, without unity’s meddling:
- it’s basically an optimized version of SEGI, the latter being open source and have cascade too.
- you can jump start your solution with those slide and adapting SEGI (I have made a line by line commentary on the SEGI thread if that’s helping)
- their major realization is to slow down update because GI is low frequency and low Update. This low hanging fruits can be done easily with SEGI by parametrizing the main raycasting loop (add an offset and a loop counter passed by c# code), you could probably have the burst update too (many ray in a single frame) to have the same effect to initialize updates. Since SEGI works with a kind of accumulation buffer (infinite bounces by spreading the bounces over the frame by accumulating them), you can also just stop update if the GI clipmap isn’t moving to save precious cycles.
- continue adding idea presented on the slide to get the best version
- ???
- profit!!
Be production ready with a limited amount of effort RIGHT NOW!
That cubemap normalization was super handy and reduce a theorical problem I discovered while making an analysis for my own take on GI. Still I can’t chase too many goose right now 
I’ll have to wait…
I don’t support the Yes, because that would mean 100% of the people would vote for the same. So I support the Yes and the Yes instead. Now, it’s not 100%.
And BTW, oh man! My stealth-based game would really love this stuff. I could use real time lightning for everything, everywhere without tanking the performance. So pretty please!
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To be honest - you can’t bake really big worlds. E.g. terrain module will freaking explode if you do so, or will take eternity to bake the lighting. And the results are meh at best.
(Heck, even small ones 2x2 KM’s are a pain in the bottom part to bake).
So I’d rather have this real realtime GI than precomputed one. And I’d be more than happy to toss away freaking nightmare that is Enlighten and it’s weirdo-brother Progressive.
Also, solving problem by bruteforcing a hardware solution (Hi there, Nvidia) is not an actual solution to the problem.
No doubt in the future we might see more of the “real” raytracing though.
But at the same time, what if we got more cores / speed / memory for use instead of really costly RTX cores?
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How does it work at long distances?
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Fine according to the paper, in fact their game is design around long distance.
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Isn’t SEGI screen-space based?
Because the slides are mostly about avoiding a screen space solution.
Not the most stellar graphics I’ve ever seen, but no need for probes and AO? Sign me up …
EDIT: I could be wrong, their website has some very pretty stuff, not sure at which point they were taken…
This looks awesome. Nice!
They do have a slide on limitations, which might stop it from being useful for some games.
I’m wondering how this would work with stuff like torches swinging around in dark areas. This really isn’t my area of expertise, so I wonder if it could be combined with other methods to cover that kind of use case?
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Torches and such have a pretty low radius, so you could probably fake it with some cheap volumetrics.
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I think you still can combine with a real time lighting solution, so you can have real time torch light if you accept that it does not contribute in the GI at all. You only lit a small area directly.
The more interesting problems would be asteroid falling or flare guns or fast daylight changing (bloodcursed elven arrows in skyrim) I think.
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