Get Your Ray Tracing on With This New ReShade Method [Videos]

Peter Donnell / 5 years ago

Ray Tracing

There are loads of bits and bobs being said about Ray Tracing, heck, I say a lot of them myself. However, there’s still not a whole lot actually in the wild that you can play and test. However, a modder has been tooling up a new version of ReShade, which can add a form of Ray Tracing to older PC games. Furthermore, it works on games that weren’t designed with Ray Tracing in mind, albeit not all of them.

Global Illumination

The new method uses the Global Illumination technique within ReShade. People have already posted videos and images of Batman: Arkham Knight, Quake, Yakuza Kiwami 2 and more. The results are honestly quite impressive. Sure, they’re not as impressive as properly made Ray Tracing implementation into the games engine. However, it’s amazing to see some modern tricks being taught to old dogs.

“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.” – Glitcher

Alpha

The plugin is in alpha right now and isn’t available to the general public. It’s also said to be pretty CPU intensive. This isn’t an Nvidia RTX thing, it’s more software based than anything else. However, it’s early days, and who knows how this will develop over the weeks and months, even years to come.