Realism is only one of the benefits of global illumination, the other (perhaps more important) is the massive increase in productivity you can get in creating e

Realism is only one of the benefits of global illumination, the other (perhaps more important) is the massive increase in productivity you can get in creating environments. Having dynamically lit environments in engines with pre baked lightning requires carefully placing emitters, triggering them on geometry changes and so on. See when people argue “I wan’t dynamic and destructible environments” the problem is to a large extent the lighting. If you can blow a hole in the roof but the sun doesn’t shine in - you can tell something is wrong. So you can’t make a hole in the roof. With GI you can crash a part of the roof and the interior lighting “just works”.