Ah, I see, thank you for explaining.
I suppose I’m curious how important specular lighting is to your art direction, because in my testing SWRT and HWRT look borderline identical on most geo situations, while SWRT is a fair bit cheaper. Image stability shouldn’t be different between the two, because they both use the same final gather and integration passes. HWRT would let you scale up to larger sizes with far-field, but your HLOD system should probably be finalized and it sounds like you’re actively tinkering with that?
Ah, I see. Your use case for shadowing makes sense.
You can also cut down on lumen costs in other ways, go to their documentation and read the performance guide. Lumen can run either pretty fast or extremely slowly depending on a the minutae of the settings, but the big thing is that reflections get expensive FAST.
That’s a fair bit for VisBuffer and Basepass, and with nanite your opaque geo cost should be more or less flat. If you have a lot of translucency or skeletal meshes, you’ll definitely want to get those under control to keep those costs low. For materials, I don’t remember what the system for that is now but you may want to do material consolidation?