Crysis as you've never seen it before - with ray traced lighting and co-op play
The arrival of Nvidia's RTX line of graphics cards may not have immediately ushered in a new era of games built around the concept of ray traced rendering but it has put the technique on the map, with results impressive enough to inspire developers to add ray traced effects to existing games - several of which do not actually require Nvidia hardware acceleration. We recently looked at a stunning path traced version of Minecraft, but what if RT techniques could be applied to all DirectX9 and DirectX11 games? And what happens if we apply that new technology to classic PC mangler, Crysis? Watch the video embedded on this page and you'll see that it works to a transformative degree - albeit with limitations.
It's all because of a new extension currently in development for the powerful post-process injection tool, Reshade, created by modding veteran and Nvidia Ancel contributor, Pascal Gilcher. Reshade works by hooking into DirectX, accessing the data contained in the depth and colour buffers to accomplish a range of post-process effects, including SMAA anti-aliasing, screen-space reflections, depth of field and colour tints to name but a few. A new ray tracing feature is now available in alpha builds - and strictly speaking, this adds a new layer of global illumination derived from path tracing. It's not a full fat implementation as we saw in Minecraft, but it can have a transformative effect - particularly on titles like the original Crysis, created at a time when the way games were lit was somewhat naïve compared to modern day implementations.
Crysis was a pioneer for screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) which uses data from the depth buffer to add shade to the nooks and crannies on-screen. The technique has evolved constantly over the last decade, but path traced global illumination can take this to the next level: Reshade beams out three rays per pixel in calculating shade and light bounce - giving a new layer of accuracy and depth to the way the scene is lit. Take a look at the video below and you'll see a number of A to B comparisons that reveal a stark difference.
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