Damian Stempniewski has shared some tips and tricks on setting up lighting with The CGSociety.
One of the biggest challenges is to maintain good visuals within platform limitations. No matter if it’s PC or console, you want to make it playable on as many configurations as possible. The lighting budget may depend on the project and engine; for runtime lighting (e.g. CRYENGINE) you may want to keep in mind things like overlapping dynamic lights count and local probes in the scene, dynamic shadows resolutions, or type of lights (for example: shadow casting omni light may be more expensive than shadow casting spot light, but at the same time spot light generates more drawcalls and takes some texture memory for projection maps); for prebaked lighting (lightmaps, voxel GI) another factor is video memory. It’s good practice to set some separate budgets for things like lights, fog, particles and geometry, so it’s much smoother to control it during optimization.