Grant Theft Auto games are more known for their scope than their beauty, even if they tend to offer some of the more immersive in-game worlds yet seen with each generational release. They're also well known for their modding scenes, however, with many people continuing to beautify the experiences years after the games debuted, thereby keeping them relevant in a graphical sense. The latest mod to do so adds ray tracing to GTA V and it looks absolutely stunning, even in an early alpha release.
Ray tracing has a number of exciting advantages. The most obvious is in the softening of light and shadows. Where before, hard-baked shadows and lighting effects meant that everything had a crisp edge to it, ray tracing makes for much more natural, gradiented shadow edges. Reflections are also completely dynamic, so you'll see a lot more in the way of reflected light on mirrored surfaces.
Interior environments benefit the most from this mod so far, it seems, with in the inside of the video-makers in-game apartments looking stunningly realistic, thanks to the many, many light reflections that are rendered with this new ray tracing shader.
Performance doesn't seem to be particularly strong at this point, with noticeable stuttering during some transitions to the new ray tracing shading system. But this is early days still and we don't know what hardware the video was created with.
If you want to try out the Alpha version of this shader yourself, you can support modder Marty McFly over on his Patreon page to get immediate access.
