Previous-generation rasterized solutions were extremely limited, and prior ray tracing solutions had a high performance cost while at most managing one limited lighting bounce. RTXGI, in contrast, is fully dynamic with infinite light bounces, which is made possible in part by the complex ray tracing workloads being calculated across multiple frames each second to create a high quality multi-bounce lighting cache with visibility information. If nothing changes in the scene, the information’s already available in the cache. If something changes, update the necessary details. And by calculating across multiple frames, the cost is spread, making RTXGI highly performant in comparison to all other ray-traced global illumination solutions.
Best of all, developers can add RTXGI with ease thanks to the release of an Unreal Engine 4 plugin, which can be freely downloaded from the RTXGI website.
To support ICARUS’ massive biomes, and the massive locales of other open world games, a new RTXGI feature called Infinite Scrolling Volumes has been developed, and is being launched alongside ICARUS. As players move through ICARUS’ environment, lighting is updated in a large volume around the player’s viewpoint, to a range where detail can’t be perceived, reducing memory requirements and increasing performance. Without Infinite Scrolling Volumes, you’d be required to calculate and store the entire world’s lighting in the cache, which simply isn’t feasible.