Todays hardware and Lighting?

One of todays largests draw backs is the over use of lightmapping. If I create scene using only REAL lights. Culling lights that dont appear within my viewing frustum ofcourse. And only displaying no more than 8 lights at a time. Will it be feasable with todays hardware?? I want to use real dynamic lighting. I feel that lighting is key, and the ability to move, and interact with that light is the most important part of games of the future. So once again. Will todays cards handle that amount of lighting?? Or should I stick with lightmaps??

Huh? What modern engine is sticking with light maps these days?

You can use GL lights, and it will work reasonably well. However, you’ll get very poor shading, as your geometry will appear very triangulated. Per-pixel lighting really makes this look much nicer.

Most of the threads on this board about bump mapping, normal mapping and per-pixel lighting ought to tell you more about this topic. The Doom3 thread probably contains a lot of good information about it, although it also contains a lot of speculation, flamage and drivel…

IIRC, UT2k3 still uses light maps.

Yes but they are verry high resolution. (That what’s I have seen of it - still they’re lightmaps of course.)
And they have fake projected texture shadows (aka grates casing shadows by using projected textures on all geometry in the volume)

Charles