Slower Light Bake Times on 2021

[PeanutShoes]

Hi all! I just upgraded from 2020 to 2021 and I noticed my lighting bake times have become much longer for the same scene. Is this happening with anyone else and is there a way to resolve it?

Below are some details to help outline the conditions I am testing with and the behaviours I noticed:

I use below settings:
-Scene uses URP
-Lighting Mode - Subtractive
-Light Mapper - Progressive GPU (Preview)
-Light Map Resolution - 10

Tested on 2 different rigs with similar results:
-RTX 2070, 32 GB RAM, i7-8750H
-RTX 3070, 32 GB RAM, Ryzen 9 5900

Behaviour summary:
-I noticed in the bottom right it see the Global Illumination timer repeatedly goes blank and starts again with a higher time, the timer counts down and goes blank again and then starts again with a higher time. This happens several times throughout the process.
-The total bake time displayed after the bake completes is really low compared to the actual time it took to complete (ranges from 1 to 5 seconds while in reality it takes around 5 minutes to complete the bake)
-Tested baking a simple basic scene on 2020 and 2022 is about 5 times faster than 2021; with 2020 having the fastest time out of the 3 editors. (scene is just a plane with 6 cubes on it)
-Tested in a regular 3D scene and URP scene with the same slow bake times.

Thank you for reading and appreciate any help. I really like the new features on 2021 but this is keeping me from upgrading. All suggestions are welcomed and will try them out.

[CodeSmile]

@PeanutShoes

scene is just a plane with 6 cubes on it

I would advise to take another set of timings with a more realistic scene. Perhaps initial baking overhead may be higher but it is outweighed when baking a complex scene. Just a guess but I wouldn‘t make a judgement call based on this scene alone.

[PeanutShoes]

Thanks for the feedback! I had the same result unfortunately when I first tried baking my full game scene. I’ve just redone baking in 2020 and 2021 to show actual numbers in the screenshots below. For some reason 2020 shows roughly accurate bake times while 2021 lists it as 1 or 2 seconds bake time when it took roughly double the time of 2020 to process.

[PeanutShoes]

Still haven’t found a reason for the slower bakes unfortunately. Really appreciate if anyone has any ideas to try.