RTGI and Complete RT Shaders Get Major Updates with Sky Color

RTGI, not to be confused with NVIDIA's RTXGI SDK which was recently updated to version 2.0, is Pascal Gilcher's famous ReShade screen space ray tracing shader. The German graphics modder and former NVIDIA employee rose to fame when he released it in May 2019, providing PC gamers with an easy way to improve the lighting of older games at an acceptable performance cost.

Since then, countless ReShade presets powered by RTGI have been created for compatible PC games, many of which we've covered here on Wccftech. Meanwhile, Pascal Gilcher has continuously improved the shader for his Patreon backers. Three months after his latest update, Gilcher released a new version (0.51) of RTGI this past Thursday.

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As usual, the modder also relayed some details on the latest improvements. According to him, there are lots of tweaks to the filtering and checkerboard rendering, which are much more motion-stable now. He also added the ability to disable diffuse or specular GI, in case users only want to use one of the two at any time. RTGI 0.51 also brings ray traced sky color back with a new method that Gilcher reckons should be relatively robust and won't have a "toggle on" effect when the sky is first visible. He also mentioned 'significant performance enhancements' depending on the scene and provided an image comparison in Hogwarts Legacy.

However, RTGI is not the only ReShade ray tracing shader any longer. In late 2023, fellow modder NiceGuy released his own so-called Complete RT shader, which we have since covered in various showcases (Horizon Zero Dawn, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption 2, and even Zelda via emulator).

The Complete RT shader also received a major update (version 1.3) a few hours before RTGI. NiceGuy said he has now fully implemented a technique inspired by ReSTIR-GI; version 1.2 implemented the spatial part, whereas this new update adds the temporal dimension, providing a