Baking Light vs. Lumen for a FPS Game

Hi everyone

So I’ve started learning Unreal few months ago in order to make my own game demo. I plan to make a first person game with most of the scene being indoors, and in a photorealistic style.
I went trough many tutorials and even courses about making such a projects in Unreal but I just can’t decide which pipeline should I choose. Lumen seems to make everything so much easier (and prettier ofc) but at the same time more expensive for the PC.
Also wouldn’t it be better for me (career-wise) to start old-school way? With baking lights, creating optimized uv maps, lightmaps etc?
I’ve kinda learned how to model props, how to texture them etc. But when it comes to set up the Engine I am devided.
I don’t want to just put some nice lights, make a melting-GPU-game and call it a day.
But instead, create nice looking game which is optimized and can work not only on high end PCs.

Could some dispel my doubts?

Thanks !

I would go for Lumen.

Static lighting is great, but the moment you want to move something, it all goes out the window. You can’t open a door, because the shadow will be wrong. The shadow will be wrong on the gun etc.

You can have dynamic lighting without Lumen.

You can also make Lumen an option for the players.

Thanks for the reply!

But setting a light (only the one close to the door) to dynamic wouldn’t solve the “open-door problem”?
Lumen looks pretty heavy (fps-wise) for the PC’s that are not that new. I created the same scene using Lumen and other one with baked light. The difference was around 30 fps.
Also the project that I am working on is not that big- couple of levels, most of which are indoors. And making the player able to turn on and off Lumen looks like making the project twice- for baked lighting and for Lumen (where probably much of the aspects would have to be adjusted- fog, dust particles, light sources intesity etc.).
I want to make it as “pretty” as possible but also as optimised as I can make it to be.

I don’t think you want to go down the baked lighting road. Not unless you’re targeting machines that are 10 years old.

You can turn Lumen on and off ( and several other GPU killing things ) at runtime with console commands.

Hm, I see. Could you mention those GPU killing things? Or some sources where I could read more about them?

Sorry, that’s almost impossible to answer without an example.

Turning off Lumen, even on an empty level, will give you a very noticeable benefit, but a lot of other things really depend on what you’re doing.

Two minutes with the foliage tool, for instance, can bring a RTX 40 series to its knees if you don’t know how to manage it.

You have to pick a target architecture ( hardware ). If it’s very basic, then using 4 rather than 5 would make more sense.