Assassin’s Creed Shadows is easily one of the best-looking games on PC right now. This is the first AC game that feels, in terms of lighting, as good as AC: Unity. This is mainly due to the RTGI implementation, as the game takes full advantage of it.
In the past couple of years, a lot of people have been asking why the devs have moved from rasterized pre-baked lighting to real-time Ray Tracing. And we finally have some insight from the devs themselves. Forget all the YouTubers who constantly post angry videos. Here is why more and more games will be using RTGI.
As Ubisoft’s Nicolas Lopez said during a GDC 2025 presentation, it would take 2 whole years to pre-bake the lighting of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Let this sink in. Two whole years, just for pre-baking the lighting. Not only that, but the game would require 2TB of data. And this right here is the reason why a) a lot of games do not look as good as Uncharted 4, AC: Unity or The Last of Us, and b) why more and more devs are replacing their rasterized techniques with RT.
To give you an idea, although Assassin’s Creed Unity had an amazing high-quality baked GI, it was limited to a small world and a fixed time of day. With AC: Syndicate, Ubisoft added interpolation between ToDs to have dynamic ToD as well as more ToDs in general. This had an impact on the game’s GI, which did not look as good as that of AC: Unity.
However, things went downhill with AC: Origins. To get results similar to those of AC: Unity, the game would require 450GB of lighting data and it would take 3 months to bake the lighting. Thus, Ubisoft decided to use a more efficient GI solution. Yes, they had to make some compromises. At the same time, though, they were able to reduce the GI data to 9GB. So no, we weren’t delusional when we were saying that AC: Unity’s lighting was way better than that of Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla.
We always reference Assassin’s Creed: Unity as one of the games with the best pre-baked lighting. And now you know why. Ubisoft went all in with it. But, as explained above, this was only possible due to the game’s world size and fixed time of day. Would I love to see a similar AC game? Definitely. But here is the thing. AC: Mirage, which was a “smaller” and more “traditional” AC game, did not sell as good as AC: Unity. So, as a publisher, you can’t bet on something like that when RT can save you a lot of time and money.
So, now you know why more and more devs are using RTGI in their games. RT can save A LOT of development time and resources. It can also reduce the size of games. Seriously, imagine if a game came out with a 1TB disk requirement. Hell, a lot of you are still mad for games requiring 100GB.
Bottom line is that yes, you can still create rasterized games with amazing pre-baked lighting. However, it will take a lot of time to bake its lighting. It will also limit the game world and its time of day. These are all things we already knew. So, no. There isn’t any magic formula here. The most efficient way to create great-looking games is with Ray Tracing.
Again, this is nothing new for most of us. Still, this data can now be used to counter those clueless people who claim that pre-baked lighting is still viable in 2025. For smaller studios, this isn’t a viable option (unless you severely compromise your GI solution). For THE best gaming studios like Rockstar and Naughty Dog, pre-baked lighting can be used to create a small game. And that will still take a lot of time and effort. But for an open-world game? It’s out of the question!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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