Is Global Illumation ray traced or fake?

[nesumisakano]

Don't get me wrong the game looks marvelous in full RT mode.
Thing is, I've noticed a lot of area in Velen seems off and sometimes the GI doesn't seem right at all as shown in the images below.


Is this some kind of pre-baked area for GI?(I guess this is some GI bleeds beneath)

Where's my Global Illumination??

I don't know if this is some grading issue or GI just doesn't work well in Velen.
Compared it to White Orchard, the sand area there really illuminates the characters.

Uhmm... Where's my blue bounce light?

My thoughts on this GI is it isn't the real deal GI compared to CP77 or Metro Exodus.
I don't think the GI is hard ware accelerated... just my gut feeling.
Maybe that's why "Ray Tracing" performance hits like a truck.

Though I still love this update~

(I added some reshade ;v)

 

[RealNashty]

Essentially it's very similar to Metro Exodus (non-enhanced), in that it uses very limited number of bounces and a probe system on top of their traditional rasterized system. The end result (in Witcher and original Exodus release) is that most scenes look way too dark because there aren't enough bounces of light. You can see the difference pretty clearly here. You'll notice the lighting in the original Exodus release looks very similar to TW3NGU's.

Enhanced Edition got around these by using temporally accumulating light bounces, each frame calculated one additional bounce and added it on to the previous frame, resulting in "infinite" bounces. The positive being very high-quality appearing RTGI, the negative being that it takes time to temporally accumulate that data when you first enter an area (although in my eyes that's a very minor issue).

Also, here is a reddit threat with good pictures showing off the differences between RT on and off, which can be pretty stark at times.