Performance Improvements

Since its early days as a patreon-only prototype, Pascal Gilcher’s (often simply called "the Ray Tracing shader") has held a unique place in PC gaming. It’s not path tracing , nor is it hardware-accelerated like NVIDIA’s RTX. Instead, it’s a clever, screen-space, depth- and normal-buffer-driven ray marching solution that injects a form of realistic light bounces into almost any DirectX 9–12 or Vulkan game. The result? Flat, last-gen lighting gains soft ambient occlusion, color bleeding, and a tangible sense of volume.

: Adjusted the denoising filter to preserve more detail in fine shadows without increasing noise levels. Technical Context Developer : Pascal Gilcher Platform : Patreon (Marty McFly)

Because RTGI lacks world-space data, you still get the classic limitations: light bounces disappear at screen edges, and objects entering the frame initially lack indirect illumination. 0.17.0.2 does not—and cannot—fix this. What it does better is masking those artifacts. The fade-in of bounced light when you pan the camera is quicker and less jarring than in 0.16.