Ray tracing is a hot technology right now, with Nvidia adding support for its to RTX graphics cards, rumors of AMD doing the same with its next-generation Navi cards, and more game developers and benchmark creators implementing it to make their games and experience look better than ever. But they aren't the only ones. Modders are also getting to grips with the light path tracing technology and even in pixellated voxel games like Minecraft, the effect of adding ray tracing is stunning.
Popular shader pack, Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS) has a new developer version that implements path tracing, which is a close cousin of ray tracing that delivers a similar end result: realistic lighting with indirect reflections. The results are astouding, with the lighting effects changing textures in a game as low-res and low-detail as Minecraft into something that looks quite realistic, as per PCGamer.
they added ray tracing in the new minecraft shader dev build i am absolutely shitting myself pic.twitter.com/sEbY78Vuz5
— notglacier (@notglacier) March 30, 2019
Light streams through windows in diffuse patterns, reflects off of floors with colors drawn from the light source and the materials the rays hit along the way. It looks so good it could be an entirely new game or an entirely different one. It highlights how important lighting is to the visuals of a game, arguably even more so than textures of resolution.
Messing around a bit more
you can do indirect lighting and stuff now pic.twitter.com/X8q3msBen7— notglacier (@notglacier) March 30, 2019
There are some downsides to this particular implementation though. For starters, you can only gain access to this build of SEUS as a paying Patreon member. You'll also need a relatively powerful PC to run it at around 30 FPS. The demo videos shown in the above tweets required a Core i9 9900K paired with a GTX 1070 Ti. Not world leading hardware, but not the kind of thing your average gaming laptop or PC can handle.
