This is definitely an interesting one; I had no idea Enlighten was still around as a technology.
I feel like the presentation is a little hard to agree with if it’s making an argument that enlighten represents a better comprehensive GI solution over lumen; a cheaper dynamic GI solution would still definitely have its’ place alongside lumen, but that said:
- The core reason lumen is so GPU-oriented is that CPU processing power is at a premium in the current software and hardware architecture paradigm- the more you can do on the GPU is usually better for performance, especially given how few thread-limited UE can be.
- They don’t seem to mention at all that, in addition to dynamic lights and materials, lumen supports dynamic geometry. None of the test scenes I saw in the video seemed to show off dynamic geometry, or emissive objects. Enlighten only supporting scenes with static geometry is a big limitation in many ways, and it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of trying to make worlds feel more alive. Perhaps I misunderstand how the probe system works, this is just to my understanding.
- Particle effects don’t look correctly lit with the scene in enlighten- could be a bug or a settings issue, but supporting correct volumetrics and lit particles in lumen is a massive advantage.
There could be a use case for enlighten in games that want to support dynamic lights but can’t pay the cost of lumen, but as engine versions roll by and lumen just gets leaner and meaner, I feel like a much bigger advantage would have to be offered by a third-party lighting solution to really offset lumen’s utility.