According to Ubisoft’s Nicolas Lopez during a GDC presentation, it would take 2 TB of data along with 2 whole years to pre-bake the in-game lighting of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but as the game was rendered with Ray Traced Global Illumination, it eliminated the need for that enormous storage space.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows easily ranks among one of the most realistic looking videogames of all time, but if the game was rendered in the older, rasterized visual technology it would’ve taken 2 additional years plus a gigantic 2 TB of storage to accomplish. This statement from the Ubisoft dev clearly shows how much time and storage area was saved due to the game using Ray tracing.
Ray Tracing as a generational leap in terms of rendering has been viewed for a long time as borderline gimmicky and a bit obnoxious that while looks incredibly realistic, doesn’t really justify the colossal performance hit. However as the Ubisoft dev stated, it does help with the storage sizes of videogames which is truly appreciated cause as games get bigger and more computationally complex, the storage requirements would naturally skyrocket if rasterized rendering had been used instead. In that case, Ray Tracing was clearly the right choice and seemingly the way forward for videogames in terms of rendering.
Games like Assassin’s Creed Unity and Uncharted 4 use baked lighting and generally look far better than even newer titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla but the Worlds in the former games are a lot smaller compared to somethng like Shadows where using pre-baked lighting would’ve caused a massive surge in storage.
It’s worth noting that if Assassin’s Creed Origins had used baked lighting similar to Unity, it would’ve taken a total of 450 GB of data which clearly wasn’t ideal in any case. The massive increase in storage requirements also shows why more developers prefer using RTGI over rasterized rendering technology.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows came out on March 20 for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and the PC platform.
