Pascal Gilcher is currently working on a ray traced Global Illumination method for ReShade. What this ultimately means is that PC gamers will be able to enable this ray tracing Global Illumination technique in all DX9, DX10 and DX11 (something that will obviously give a visual boost to a lot of older games).
This ray tracing Global Illumination method is currently in a beta phase and Gilcher aims to make it beta-worthy for its Patreon members soon, and release it afterwards to the general public.
According to Gilcher, the major constraint at this point is performance, meaning that this technique will increase the overall GPU requirements for older titles. Still, we believe that this is something that a lot of PC gamers will at least try once.
“The way ray/path tracing works cannot be cut short in any way so I have to find a solution that requires as few rays as possible while not being noisy and also temporally stable.”
Now while this ray traced Global Illumination method for Reshade is not available yet, Digital Foundry shared a video showcasing this technique in Crysis.
As you will see, there are some limitations to what Reshade can achieve. And while there are visual improvements in various scenes, there are also some issues that may be hard to resolve (like objects that you don’t see not being ray traced). Furthermore, this ray tracing Global Illumination method does not take advantage of the RTX graphics cards, and is not as accurate as what developers are currently achieving with NVIDIA’s hardware.
Still, it’s a pretty cool and interesting concept so here is hoping that Gilcher will further optimize this Reshade method before releasing it to the public.
Kudos to our reader ‘Ivano Er Libanese’ for bringing this to our attention!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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