Agreed, and it’s also conflating engineering cost with the cost of making games. The big benefit of using physically based rendering architectures isn’t saving

Agreed, and it’s also conflating engineering cost with the cost of making games. The big benefit of using physically based rendering architectures isn’t saving engineering time, it’s saving artist time not having to fiddle with tuning each ad-hoc effect individually. It seems to also somewhat discount the increases in realism and fidelity we are getting in the same dev time as before.