Path tracing, as opposed to Ray tracing, is a term typically referring to a ground truth renderer. It does so by accumulating photons on the screen after bouncing them around in a stochastic way, meaning randomly sampled and integrated over time.
In other words, it's photorealistic.
The problem with real time path tracing is that it usually produces a very noisy image, since we can only afford a single photon sample per pixel.
Thanks to NVIDIA's new DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction technology, we can fully denoise the rendered image in a relatively stable manner.
In Archean, we have implemented the path tracer (with ray reconstruction) as a separate renderer that can be toggled in the settings.
This option is only available on NVIDIA graphics cards.
It will work on RTX 2000 series, though it's recommended to use a 4000 series for better performance.
On the left is before this update, on the right is after enabling the Path Tracer and Ray Reconstruction.
Known issues:
- Shadow ghosting and pixel smudging with fast movements
- Blurry terrain when the sun is low
- Very poor performance in vehicles made with unpainted metal blocks
We will keep improving it for sure, stay tuned for future updates.
Full changelog:
- Implemented DLSS Ray Reconstruction and a Fully Path-Traced Renderer (stochastic Ray-Traced ambient lighting, rough metal reflections, and soft shadows from unlimited lights without affecting performance)
- Added an option to rasterize screens of components/dashboard as full resolution overlays to make them clearer and easy to read (enabled by default)
- Dashboards: moved emissive layer to front face instead of back face
- Admin Panel: Fixed CTD when sorting by alias/owner in ascending order with multiple entities having an empty alias/owner
- Increased the Sun's temperature (changes the color of the atmosphere and intensity)