This is not the first time I've seen a developer mention the long time it takes to render images, but this is honestly something that seems strange to me. The geometry, lighting, and texturing in these games doesn't match AAA games real-time rendered scenes, so why do they take so long to prerender?
Rendering in true physical lighting is nothing like a game engine. Yes game engines are getting good, i mean insanely good, I have personally been working with unreal engine recently to try and start doing rendering that way because it is insanely good and real time (ish). One of the major differences between this and a game engine is how much is faked in a game engine. lighting is not accurate in games engines, unreal engine is getting damn close though. Lighting in game engines are prebaked, which is something done on development side and takes an insane amount of time to calculate, and due to that shadows aren't accurate when it involves things moving, prebaking only works with stationary objects.
It wasn't until real time ray tracing that things got closer, and real time ray tracing is a fun concept because it basically takes the 3d rendering that we do, and does a half ass job it and overlays it in your game, Ever notice the pixelization in rtx games on lower end cards? those are basically the result of it not being able to render fast enough for the scene, they are actually called fireflys and have been a known thing in 3d rendering for a looooong time. that effect is new to video games and only rtx enabled games because its trying to accurately rendering lighting that it cant do fast enough.
Then their is polygon count.. Video games use bump maps and normal maps to simulate high polygon count, because well... trying to through an insanely high polygon count character into a video game engine would get you about a half fps and would look like complete dog shit. Go up to a nice textured wall in almost any AAA game and look at it from an angle, the protrusions and definition disappear the more of an angle you look at it. yes you can take like a daz character and load it into the unreal engine, but the polygons are significantly dropped because their is no subdivision so all the high detail shit we put into them, disappears without bump or normal maps. also your AAA games, you have teams of developers and millions of dollars behind it. not one guy with about $5000 worth of hardware....
all that being said, unreal is getting damn close.. and i am looking into using it for future projects.
and in-case you were ever curious, this is what a 1 second render looks like
