If you thought Minecraft looked good with ray tracing-style effects through path tracing, have a look at what the new ReShade mod for Crysis does when it adds in some beautiful ray-traced Global Illumination.
Digital Foundry did a break down in the video above, with the new ReShade mod adding ray-traced Global Illumination in Crysis. Pascal Gilcher is the developer behind the ReShade mode where he explained about his new Crysis mod: "I'm working hard on a ray traced Global Illumination method for ReShade. This means you can have GI as drop-in in every game you want, with a few clicks. Work on such a feature started over a year ago, I posted some screenshots on the ReShade forums but eventually discarded it, due to other projects having more priority".
The new ReShade mod for Crysis can be supported on the ReShade Patreon for $20 tier, for die hard Crysis fans who want an injection of graphics into the still-great looking game.
He added:
Since NVIDIA kicked off mainstream interest in ray tracing, I figured this is the right moment to revive that project and start making Ray Tracing accessible for everyone, which is what ReShade is all about. Alpha supporters are already testing (and apparently enjoying) the new feature! I hope to make it beta-worthy soon and also release it to the general public.
How does this relate to Minecraft Path Tracing shaders? Well, besides the path tracing part, not at all. Minecraft SEUS PTGI shaders are inherently tied to the voxel data of Minecraft, while also having data available from outside the screen, my implementation uses neither voxels nor does it access or store data outside the screen. Even though these restrictions are pretty tight, the feature itself is coming along nicely!
Major constraint as this point is performance (ray tracing, duh) - 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.
Global Illumination is the main focus at the moment, my shader collection qUINT already has a screen-space reflection shader so there's no reason to reinvent the wheel here.