SDFs can be pretty fast if you do the work to optimize around them. Unreal Engine has lots of features based on SDFs that are used to great effect in games that

SDFs can be pretty fast if you do the work to optimize around them. Unreal Engine has lots of features based on SDFs that are used to great effect in games that run on consumer hardware. You don't need bleeding edge hardware or software either. The game I'm working on generates a new SDF every frame for the scene (using the GPU's fragment units to rasterize the distance data for the objects in the scene into a scratch buffer) and then does cone traces through the generated SDF per-pixel to do realtime soft shadow casting and lighting, and that performs just fine even on an old laptop from 2015.