Some interesting Assassin's Creed Shadows behind-the-scenes data revealed during this year's Game Developer Conference reveals why more and more developers are leaving baked lighting behind in favor of ray-tracing. During the Rendering Assassin's Creed Shadows presentation presented by Ubisoft's Nicolas Lopez, as reported on the ResetERA forums, a background for global illumination usage in the series was provided, highlighting how the more complex the game world got, the more compromises had to be made. Assassin's Creed Unity features one of the most stunning examples of baked global illumination to date, which was made possible by the relatively small world and fixed time of day. If Assassin's Creed Origins had used the same method as Unity, the game would have had 450 GB of lighting data, and it would have taken 3 months to bake the lighting. Featuring the most complex game world of the series to date, Assassin's Creed Shadows would have had 2 TB of lighting data, and it would have taken almost 2 years to bake the lighting instead. As such, with ray tracing simplifying the development pipeline considerably, developers will likely move further away from baked lighting even more in the future. The Assassin's Creed Shadows developer supported both baked global illumination and ray-traced global illumination for the time being because of the hardware landscape, but they want to rely more on ray tracing in the future. During the presentation, which is a fascinating read for all those interested in game development, data regarding Assassin's Creed Shadows ray tracing performance on consoles and PC using an RTX 4080 GPU for ray-traced global illumination and PlayStation 5 Pro performance for ray-traced reflections. With the game using quarter resolution for RTGI, the Xbox Series X is faster than the base PlayStation 5, 4.30ms versus 5.00ms. The Xbox Series S is even faster, but that is due to the game running on the system at the internal resolution of 900p, as opposed to the 1440p resolution of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions. Regarding ray-traced reflections, the PlayStation 5 Pro couldn't be compared to any other console version of the game, as it's the only console supporting them, and the only available comparison with the RTX 4080 GPU delivers the expected difference in performance. 2 of 9 Assassin's Creed Shadows is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S worldwide. You can learn more about the game by checking out my review. Deal of the Day