Renowned modder Pascal Gilcher, also known as Marty McFly, has demonstrated an impressive world space path tracing solution implemented in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Marty, the engineer behind the screen space ray tracing shader that powered so many PC game mods in the last few years, has worked hard to deliver this unprecedented lighting upgrade. According to him, the solution is loosely based on voxels and stores a scene's geometry in a method that can be likened to spatial hashing. His voxel-based path-tracing solution is dynamic, meaning that cell changes purge old data to avoid excessive memory consumption. The lighting is based on NVIDIA's ReSTIR GI path tracing algorithm.
Interestingly, the modder's approach is not that different from the one used by NVIDIA in RTX Remix. In this instance, the ReShade API intercepts the CPU-GPU feed during rendering, making it scalable to virtually any game. Unlike RTX Remix, which was designed for fixed-function pipelines, Marty's PTGI solution works not only with DX9 games but also with more recent titles like Grand Theft Auto V (DX11) and Control (DX12).
Speaking to Eurogamer's Digital Foundry, Marty said the path tracing solution could eventually be expanded to allow new light sources, replace geometry, and take advantage of hardware acceleration for ray/path tracing.
PTGI, which you can preview in the Skyrim demonstration video below, isn't available for download yet. Marty explained that his focus was on Fulcrum, which will function as the underlying backbone. However, the modder plans to devote more time to the development of this path tracing solution, and more news on its availability to Patreon subscribers should be available soon.
Following the stunning debut of path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, this Skyrim demonstration is yet more proof that the technology is the future of lighting in games. If PTGI can truly be injected effortlessly into almost any PC game, the add-on could singlehandedly transform graphics as we know it. Stay tuned on Wccftech for further news, as this is one topic we'll be sure to follow with a keen eye in the future.
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