In an unexpected move during the GDC, NVIDIA has released its own fork of the Godot engine that incorporates path tracing rendering. This modified version, now available for download, represents a direct investment by the company in the open-source ecosystem. The announcement is complemented by visual material showcasing the technology's capabilities.
Technical integration and roadmap 🗺️
The fork is based on Godot 4 and adds a path tracing backend that uses Vulkan Ray Tracing and the RTX libraries. It includes support for global illumination, reflections, refractions, and area shadows, processed on the GPU. NVIDIA has published a roadmap detailing plans to optimize the denoiser, improve memory management, and add more types of emitters. The download includes a demo project.
When the giant does your homework for you 🤔
It's curious to see how a community project suddenly receives an advanced feature, developed by an external team with abundant resources. Now developers can experiment with a level of realism that, perhaps, was not an immediate priority for the main team. One wonders if this is a gesture of support or a very sophisticated way of advertising their GPUs. In any case, the code is there for anyone who wants to tinker with it.