Is it viable to use cycles in a game engine that I am creating?
only for baking,
look into it,
Don’t bake lighting on anything that moves.
Bake diffuse, normals etc.
Not if you want to measure gameplay in seconds per frame instead of frames per second.
You can use texture baking in cycles to make textures to use in your game.
Why would you do that?
Okay you are a programmer not an artist I get that,
but please understand that there is a reason that there are no genuine ray tracers for game engines
Actually, there is such a thing as realtime raytracing now (ever heard of the Brigade engine).
The only problem is that you need the absolute best hardware that money can buy and that is for an experience containing a lot of grain (providing there’s a lot of movement). It will be a while till hardware is able to create a noise free image in less than 15 milliseconds (the threshold for having 60 FPS).
There has been talk about dedicated path tracing hardware, but I have not seen any brought to market.
chances are it already exists somewhere in a 90% done state.
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr-developers/powervr-gr6500-ray-tracing
More importantly, these blocks do not affect the shading performance of the traditional graphics pipeline because they do not use up shading GFLOPS to perform ray tracing-related tasks. Thus PowerVR GR6500 is able to perform ray tracing tasks 100x more efficiently compared to using GPU compute or other software-only approaches on traditional graphics architectures.