Real-time lighting solutions generally incur higher ongoing computational costs, while baked lighting typically involves higher upfront production costs.
Real-time lighting dynamically calculates light during rendering, requiring more powerful hardware and increasing runtime expenses. Baked lighting, by contrast, precomputes light data in the production phase, raising initial time and labor costs but reducing long-term computational demands.
For static scenes, baked lighting lowers long-term resource usage; for dynamic environments needing frequent light adjustments, real-time lighting may be more suitable despite higher ongoing costs.