I’m very lucky to have been able to get an RTX 3080 early on when they first came out, so I’ve been able to go through this course entirely with real-time lighting enabled and skipping needing to build any lighting (at least so far). So I’ve just been able to move lights around and see it update in real time, as well as play around with RT reflections, shadows and ambient occlusion. It looks great with minimal effort.
And since Nvidia released the DLSS plugin for Unreal (it’s on the marketplace for free with really detailed instructions/documentation), you can actually just enable DLSS in your viewport directly and get the FPS benefits right away while developing. Which is why I’m able to hit 90-120 FPS at all with pure RT-only global illumination and shadows and reflections and everything.
Unreal’s implementation unfortunately can’t do infinite RT global illumination bounces like Metro Exodus’ engine can, but it still looks really really nice and makes prototyping and designing lighting more or less instantaneous… similar to Lumen for Unreal 5 I think, although this isn’t screen space only so you don’t lose bounces for things that are off-screen.
Anyway thought I’d share!
Edit: Did some more work to the room. Unreal Engine rocks.
