No, the GTX 980 doesn’t have the tech built in, it requires an RTX or one of the new Quadro or Tesla cards
is there any update on rtx lightmap baking? Will it be available in 4.21 at all? Even in some form of beta? I should have my rtx2080ti in a few days :D…
Guys you can’t just plug in a raytrace card and then tell a photon based offline renderer like lightmass to just use GPU power. You need to rewrite the renderer code almost base up to enable brute forcing or lightmass like support plus make it GPU compatible, at which point might as well replace the entire aging renderer with a new one.
Lightmass is the same story as Mental ray it uses similar underlying tech like final gather this accounts to all the inaccuracies in light quality and bounce, light bleeds etc… In the end they had to kill mental ray because its cheaper to write a whole new renderer from scratch these days than beat a dinosaur.
Also as many suggested here RT is just hype these days, it will be many years until it can be properly used or integrated if its not replaced by then by something more hybrid but with equal or better results.
RTX wont start being added into the main UE4 build until 4.22 (end of the year). And there’s no word on RTX lightmap baking yet.
lightmass is trash. Spending 8 hours to see what moving a light does for your scene is just a horrible horrible work flow.
what…
Is that why multiple engines are going the way of raytracing for lightmaps directly in the viewport? Raytracing for developers has been here, before the RTX/DXR APIs. Those will only improve our RT bakers. And Epic has already announced they’re working on at least a GPU based Lightmass.
It seems like people expected “real-time raytracing” to be fully raytraced scenes, but there are things that raytracers handle inherently better, while some things are still better(cheaper) to do with the years of improvements to rasterization that we’ve collected. The new Turing cards have the potential to improve rasterization even more with Mesh and Texture-Space shader models.
Hybrid-Ray Tracing is just around the corner, but I’m sure it’ll be like TressFX, dynamic GI(voxel, cone trace, distance field, etc. not precomputed SH), and other niche features from NVidia and only be used in a few games for awhile.
A moving light doesn’t need to be baked
He wasn’t talking about a moving light but moving a light and then bake again.
Well then yeah that is a horrible horrible work flow.but has nothing to do with hardware but with scene management
I can accept the fact that it’s just cool new tech just to play with and at the moment that’s the only thing of value that is being sold and until the reviews are in then if that is all it does then it’s not a “HUGE” change as to current technology that I could justify as an expense as a Indy developer. Rather spend the $500+ dollars on a year supply of macaroni and cheese.
Then of course there is all that false economy stuff of being a first adopter and being the one paying for the tech development 
In the mean time it’s just a thing that does all this stuff that no one knows how to do and trying to be convinced that you need it…aka Hype
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Now if it also made me a sandwich hummmm…
i mean… no word… but we do see videos of it in action…
you guys are talking about baking while this technology aims to simulate G.I , acurate shadows and reflection in real time , i don’t get it !!! if you want to bake with gpu go get “luaxang gpu lightmass” ^^
those are tools , and a tools can be usefull, it will depend of Art director , but i’m pretty sure that real time g.i and reflection rendering will not be a hype,
-clearly as a gamer ( and like every gamer i hope ) im tired of screen space reflexion , and fake g.i with dark shadow/penumbra in a full cycle night and day game ( like state of decay 2).
-now as a 3d artist Professional , i will be happy to show to my client their product in real time with real reflection, real g.i ,real refraction ( hope dxr refraction rendering will be introduce to ue4)
It’s going to be a while before it’s really viable for real-time in games(until enough people have the hardware), so for now it’s more useful as a developer tool, at the very least you can get a very quick > 1 second view of what lighting will look like, besides that it can be used to bake lighting much faster than they do now.
I think this says it all
Ugh, yeah from a gamer perspective, it’s a terrible value. But that doesn’t mean much.
For a UE4 developer, it’s a terrible value until at least UE4 versions 4.22, or a potential option if you need something more powerful than a GTX 1080ti. Or if you are an experienced programmer that wants to start messing with raytracing before there’s official support, there’s no other GPU like it.
luaxang gpu lightmass… doesnt work all that well. Looks pretty, but doesnt support HLODs… not to mention it honestly is still an overnight process… instead of an 8 hour bake it will be a 6 hour bake. On 3 computers…