Which approach helps maintain consistent lighting across devices without runtime computation?

• A. Rely on post-processing to fix lighting differences across devices.
• B. Keep exposure and white balance constant without any baked lighting.
• C. Rely on real-time lighting for all objects.
• D. Bake lighting where possible to precompute contributions and test on target devices.

Answer: (D)

Baking lighting precomputes how light interacts with surfaces, storing the results in lightmaps and indirect contributions so the final image is determined offline rather than calculated every frame. This makes lighting look the same across devices because the heavy lifting is done ahead of time, and the runtime simply reads those precomputed values. Testing on target devices helps confirm that the baked data matches the device’s textures, shaders, and capabilities, ensuring consistent results in real-world hardware. Relying on post-processing to fix lighting differences can’t guarantee the same illumination across devices, since it adjusts the final image rather than the actual lighting data. Keeping exposure and white balance constant without baked lighting still relies on runtime calculations and varies with hardware performance and rendering paths. Real-time lighting for all objects is flexible but expensive and can produce different results on different devices due to performance constraints and shader behavior. Therefore, baking lighting where possible and validating on the target devices provides the most reliable consistency.