Salient & RenderJunkie
You know what really fires me up? The dance between true photorealism and the need to keep the frame rate alive—like pulling off a flawless high‑stakes strategy in real time. How do you make the light feel real without dropping the clock? Let's dissect that trade‑off.
Sure, let’s cut to the chase. Keep your shaders lean – use cluster‑based lighting or forward+ to cull most lights, bake static GI and only compute dynamic light for the few moving sources. Use low‑res irradiance maps and upsample with a temporal filter so you get the warm glow without the cost of full‑scale radiosity. And don’t forget to lock the frame budget with a dynamic quality scaler: drop SSAO or bump map detail when the frame rate dips. That way you keep the light looking solid while the clock stays happy.
Sounds solid—baking GI and clustering lights is a good start, but watch the tone curve on those irradiance maps. If the upsampleed glow gets too flat, a slight boost on the high‑end curve can keep that warm feel. And yeah, dropping SSAO at low fps is fine, but keep a small fallback preset for the ambience, so you don’t lose that subtle depth. Keep tweaking until every specular looks like a real reflection, not a glitch. Keep me posted on the results!