Standard ambient occlusion (like SSAO or HBAO) simply darkens corners blindly. RTGI 0.33 calculated physically accurate micro-shadows. Contact shadows under a character's boots or between individual bricks looked grounded and realistic. Hardware Requirements and Performance Impact
In the world of PC gaming graphics modding, few releases have caused as significant a ripple as the , which surfaced in early 2021. At a time when native ray tracing was still a luxury reserved for AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Control , modder Pascal "Marty McFly" Gilcher delivered a software-based solution that democratized path-traced global illumination.
Unlike native ray tracing, RTGI 0.33 does not require specific tensor cores. It runs on pure compute units, which is why AMD and older Nvidia cards saw a much smaller performance hit. reshade ray tracing shader rtgi 033 2021
The 0.33 iteration focused on improving the quality of light bounces and the efficiency of the ray casting process. 1. Improved Performance & Ray Tracing Efficiency
Indirect lighting that bounces off surfaces, illuminating darker areas naturally. Standard ambient occlusion (like SSAO or HBAO) simply
Users on forums like ResetEra praised RTGI for adding “proper GI and Ambient Occlusion” to titles where the art style was beautiful but lighting felt flat. Others pointed out that it works best when you disable the game’s own bloom and ambient occlusion to avoid double‑darkening.
: By "marching" tiny rays of light across these on-screen pixels, the shader calculates how light should bounce off a red wall onto a character’s face or cast a soft shadow in a dark corner. Hardware Requirements and Performance Impact In the world
Unlike native ray tracing, which calculates light hitting objects across an entire virtual world, RTGI 0.33 uses and the game's depth buffer . It shoots virtual rays across the pixels currently visible on your screen to calculate how light bounces, scatters, and creates shadows.
Racing sim fans used RTGI 0.33 to replace the dull cockpit shadows with realistic light bleed from the track. It made sunset races look photorealistic.