Topic on User talk:Macgovern

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We see a lot of confusion with people about custom GI solutions like UE5's Lumen. They mistake it as an explicit hardware ray tracing feature, while in fact their are two modes of Lumen, that epic's devs unfortunately just call Lumen due to PR marketing reasons. This leads to people changing the ray tracing field again and again from "false" to "true", while it is not and depends on wether "hardware lumen" or only "software lumen" is implemented in the game.

Software Lumen in it's latest version is mainly a combo of conventional screen space and signed distance fields. Only Hardware Lumen makes use of polygonal ray tracing done per dedicated ray tracing hardware. So if the game only uses software lumen accordingly, then the field "ray tracing" should remain as "false" and not "true".

That confusion might become a pain in the ass with more upcoming UE5 titles. Unfortunately not many people read the guide lines, which explicitly require, that this field is reserved for hardware ray tracing only. So i suggest to change the field to a clearer definition namely "hardware ray tracing".