is baking at all usable?

19.3 i can't get cpu or gpu baking to work realiably, it paints the walls with hyper bright lights or it makes blotches everywhere with non overlapping uv oh and with recorder it turns lighting into a mess

So what do you guys use instead or is there a way to cajole this thing into working?

Beast™ I miss you man!

 

I find it pretty usable. You should post settings and scenes so we can diagnose.

 

here:

and today it won't do gpu, it snaps back to cpu

 

Lightmap Size of 4096 is way too much for GPU baking, it's probably running out of VRAM. Stick to 1024.

 

Stick to CPU baking, and ensure that 'double-sided GI' is enabled on your materials if you're getting blocky/incomplete-looking bakes

 

winner! yep gpu baking is preview for a reason, I reduced the map resolution like crazy so cpu baking is fast, how do i reserve 1 core for the editor though, it stutters a lot when baking

 

Yes, 4k lightmaps with GPU lightmapper are out of the question if you don't have a lot, a lot, a lot of VRAM.
Example: Small scene, lightmap resolution of 1024px, that is what you get at maximum with a RTX 2060. So now compare that to your device.

 

I look at the task manager and see that vram usage doesn't change much during baking so I'd like to know more, mainly what's the arithmetic to determine vram usage based on scene size and lightmap size.
20.1 seems more reliable at baking with gpu, 19.3 is moody