What can baked lighting help improve in a game?

Baked lighting can significantly enhance game performance by reducing the amount of real-time calculations required during gameplay. In a game engine like Unity, real-time lighting calculations can be demanding on system resources, especially with complex scenes that involve numerous dynamic lights and shadows. By "baking" the lighting, the engine pre-calculates how light behaves in the environment and stores this information in lightmaps. This allows for the visual appearance of lighting and shadows to be rendered more efficiently during gameplay since the GPU only needs to display the pre-computed results instead of performing complex calculations on the fly.

As a result, baked lighting optimizes performance, leading to smoother gameplay experiences, particularly on hardware with limited processing power. This process is especially useful for static objects or environments that do not require changing lighting conditions.