Path Tracing ReShade Q&A with Pascal Gilcher (AKA Marty McFly) – How It Works, When It’s Out, and More

wccftech.com:

Pascal Gilcher, also known by his username of Marty McFly, can be considered to be the most famous ReShade modder mainly thanks to his breakthrough SSRTGI (Screen Space Ray Traced Global Illumination) shader. SSRTGI has been a staple of ReShade presets and graphics enhancement packs since its debut in May 2019, and it was often covered even here on Wccftech. It became so ubiquitous that even NVIDIA added a version of the ray tracing shader to its GeForce Experience Freestyle suite of postprocessing effects.

However, 2023's new buzzword in graphics rendering is path tracing. It is the next step in the evolution from limited ray tracing of select effects like ambient occlusion, shadows, or reflections to a near-complete abandonment of rasterized effects in favor of the path tracing pipeline. PC gamers got their first taste of this technology this April with the Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive Mode preview, which immediately established itself as the new graphical standard in videogames.

The downside is that path tracing is extremely taxing on any hardware. Only the latest GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards can comfortably run Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive mode through a combination of DLSS 2 (Super Resolution) and DLSS 3 (Frame Generation).

That made Pascal's unveiling of his new work-in-progress path tracing ReShade addon even more surprising since it won't be able to leverage DLSS or even the RT Cores embedded in the GeForce RTX GPUs. Even so, Pascal is adamant that performance will be better than the regular triangle-based method.

I've had a long, interesting chat with him to discuss his path tracing approach, the ETA of its release to Patreon subscribers, and how his addon can also replace or inject many other effects. Skip past the