It had been six months since Pascal Gilcher, also known as Marty McFly, had released an update for his popular RTGI ReShade shader. However, a new version just became available to his Patreon subscribers, and it's a big one.
The modder tried to implement the ReSTIR GI algorithm in his shader, but encountered several limitations, like chroma noise (because reservoir sampling can only hold light from a single direction), sample correlation that breaks denoiser variance estimation, and white noise output. Eventually, Gilcher decided to design his own sampling algorithm, which he reckons vastly outperforms ReSTIR GI in terms of quality. The RTGI shader has also received significant improvements to its reflections, which now trace pixel-perfect paths using HiZ Min-Max Tracing.
The modder also shared future plans to split RTGI's diffuse and specular components into separate shaders to manage them more easily.
There were also improvements to other Gilcher's shaders, such as MXAO, which saw the fixing of the low-radius halos that manifested around objects, and especially Launchpad, whose optical flow is used by several other shaders. This new version of Launchpad introduces an innovative gradient descent-based algorithm that can handle subpixel shifts more effectively than traditional grid-based search methods.
Users can now choose from two general-purpose gradient descent optimizers:
- Newton: Converges quickly, making it more suitable for lower-quality settings.
- SophiaG: Converges more slowly, but finds better minima, making it a good fit for high-quality settings.
Lastly, Gilcher has released a brand new shader: path traced volumetric fog. It was originally built as a ground truth reference for a real-time effect, but the modder ultimately enjoyed it so much that the full path-traced version is now available in beta testing, although it's meant to be used for screenshots only. Check out the example below, which was captured in God of War.
The path traced volumetric fog shader is currently only available at the most expensive Patreon tier, 'Photon Mappers', which costs $20 monthly.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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