Realtime lighting vs dynamic shadows, which is more expensive? Trying to understand computational wise, which is the heavier one.
Just turn off shadows for your lights. Then use the profiler and you’ll see that shadows are massively heavier and more expensive. It also depends a lot on your rendering path, like in forward rendering how many objects are casting shadows makes a big difference. Also depends on how many realtime lights you have etc.
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It’s shadows that are normally heavier.
Interestingly enough, years ago I always thought it was lights.
Then I did a few small tests, in some 3d modelling software eg. Blender, and the results were quite interesting. It turned out that shadows, made the rendering process take a bit longer. Worse, if you have lots of objects in a scene, that can move.