As PT mode gets closer to Beta. A word about DS2 Level design and torch placement. PT mode allows correct torch without overburdening the player on always torch usage. Examples below Light penetrates this far here to proceed further you need to backtrack a bit and lit a torch there 1/1

FOFG Entry from river

FOFG River area now with water reflections

LGK Phantom summon. PT mode has full support for mirrors, however the Phantoms summoned are not part of bvh and are only part of "Reflection view", they are done using render to texture, so it means I have to overlay the Phantoms on top of the mirror render

Captured these invisible hollows in BVH, they cast a shadow from torch and other sconces, these are not rendered as part of GBuffer, hence need to be captured during shadow-map rendering of torch. Note LE blocks all shadow map rendering in PT mode, only the buffers are cached.

Base game vs PT. Some of the areas in base game have wrong cubemap or light map bakes. This area is one of them. PT will always provide correct diffuse/spec gi across all areas and zones.

Water reflection animation. Now able to capture the animation of the normals before computation, can see the effect when I change it to "Game normals". Previously the distortion was added after the reflections were computed

Added RT Reflections for water only surfaces. Note that LE already does path traced reflections for scene elements, water is handled separately, it costs <1ms over SSR, if you have performance left over you can enable this. Images (SSR + Planar vs HWRT )

i've been helping test the editor features for the private beta pathtracing version of @dslightingengine.bsky.social so what you see here is 4 WIP pics from the PT version of my Second Sin mod. PT allows me to fulfill the dream of a fully dynamically-lit Drangleic with no compromises at all

I see Microsoft is taking the Fox News approach legal accountability and liability for its services. Absolute trash.

I contributed to this PlayStation Blog post about PSSR2 in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Check it out! #AssassinsCreedShadows blog.playstation.com/2026/03/31/p...

Keep some prism stones with you always to explore the dark in PT mode.

Here are Dave and David's full unedited comments for those interested:

Work by other modders using PT build. First image is by Beubeu (Imported assets like rocks), second one is by @fromsoftserve.bsky.social (Textures/Atmosphere config) and 3rd one is by @triviavanille.bsky.social (Textures/Atmosphere config), PT does consistent lighting of all zones/objects in game

LE uses NRD Denoiser in SH/SG mode, which is used to regain macro details post denoising and also to rejitter(micro details) the output so DLSS/FSR upscaling can work correctly. Left No SH Resolve, Right with SH Resolve/Rejitter

Indirect GI only vs PT modes. In Full PT light portals at cave openings become activated, part of importance sampling including local lights. For SHARC Importance sampling is done on all bounces, here you can notice the directionality/shadows from skylighting inside.

Raster (With bounce only GI) vs Full PT. Full PT has natural fall off and shadows for all lights, while raster artificially clamps it, the distance a light reaches is based on its source size, LE auto converts lights based on their light range to size and emission intensity.

update: fsr4 got implemented today so now i can enjoy a higher path count *and* better image stability! god it makes me wanna stream the whole game like this hahaha, gotta have patience though

was invited to test out path-traced dark souls 2 thanks to @dslightingengine.bsky.social! running on a 9070 xt, it plays perfectly at native 1440p. this mod has tons of potential.

DS2LE - PT, First shot is by Beubeu with imported assets(5070 TI, 4k DLSS Quality 2Paths at 60 fps),it is harvest valley bonfire, 2nd/3rd image on ROG Ally (FSR Quality 720p (30-40FPS), thanks to user Kiwi, who also provided logs on failure to boot on Linux handhelds.

Old dragon slayer arena - path traced, the red carpet reflects nicely on all metals

Performance test on Intel ARC B580. Running in 1440p FSR Quality mode, Thanks to user Novawolf from discord.

WIP : Shadows contact hardening and better Umbra/Penumbra regions. This is done by reducing amount of blur in the spatial passes of the denoiser only where necessary, as if you reduce it everywhere in scene it introduces noise and boiling in indirectly lit dark-areas

Here are my thoughts on DLSS 5 - the ethical problem with it (I do not enumerate all issues in the video), the visual issues with it (not all enumerated, once again), how I struggle with it conceptually vs. other types of neural rendering and muvh more. youtu.be/5dTTfjBAFzc

Performance testing thanks to discord member Vorona, This is RTX 3060 Laptop (1080p) using DLSS Quality, but 2 paths per pixel. FPS varies from 55-60.

I released a new update for Firelink Edition fixing issues like Maughlin's shop reaching the limit, Shalquoir not spawning as intended, and many other small fixes and balancing changes. I'm planning a big update for the future to restore the Pursuer fights and add new spells and more. #DarkSouls2

LE PT mode. Mostly it is reconfiguring light intensities and exposure, was adjusting the particles, as can be seen from earlier videos they were too bright due to new exposure levels, now they are scaled based on downscaled GI and fall back to scene avg luminance.

The significance of a competent denoiser in real-time ray tracing cannot be understated. In our first PC video on Crimson Desert's PC version I detail the massive upgrade to lighting eclusively on PC thanks to AMD's Ray Regeneration and Nvidia Ray Reconstruction. Enjoy! youtu.be/SlRpJ553RzE

LE does per pixel path tracing , multi-bounce is supported using Nvidia SHARC and previous denoised data (diffuse/spec seperate). 1st is no SHARC/No Previous. 2nd is with Previous, 3rd is with SHARC and Previous. If all cache misses it computes the lighting at the point.

GPU Tracing Participating Media alextardif.com/Participatin... Just some HLSL this time :-) Not a long form post, I've been reading PBR and maybe this will be helpful to share!

Raime PT Test. Lots of bug fixes to PT mode, Particles are now much more balanced, lots of NRD improvements (Thanks to Dimitry) www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_cb...

Async Compute helps in heavy areas, the FOFG water area is one of the heavier ones with this view as a lot of objects from behind and infront in are in shadow map plus there is SSR happening on the water surface(RT option will be provided later).

DS2 Intro area fixes. Fixed issues with Motion vectors especially for the tiny cloth bits, all objects in this cutscene are in bvh, moving with Motion vectors www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBQD...

Illuminate

Histogram weighting during Auto-exposure calculation, left side images the weighting is disabled, a luminance around which the auto exposure should be based on is shown in yellow, the blue thick line is the selected auto exposure level. Manual bias option is still there as well.

Amana : Here the moon is just 5 Lux and all the blue flowers now emit light per triangle. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzH...

Now working with standardized values of Lux/Exposure. Previous exposure range were 1 to 15, New ranges can vary from EV100(6) 0.02 to EV100(-8) 256. This is now Majula with Sun at 5000Lux www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhw0...

The Gulch - All lighting is done from the glowing walls

The Gutter - DS2LE PT. All lights and objects casts soft shadows which is the default in PT. NRD Reblur does the denoising for the whole scene, NRD Sigma is used for special light (Torch).

Shulva Entry - PT Emission bliss. All lighting from the glowing crystals. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGCR...

Drangleic castle will be mostly lit using light portals. The vfog effects are doing using local lights, but they don't effect the ground itself, these lights which used to simulate light coming in windows are now marked as ambient and will ignored for PT.

so got the stereoscopic #3d rendering basically done on my opengl engine #degine. all the ui, including imgui, outputs in sbs #stereo3d. still some work left on the level editing tools (mouse picking is a bit difficult rn) but perf is good, only 20% hit versus 2d.

Majula archway PT, now using the light portal feature. I think I am very excited how this will turn out, I added in other areas like FOFG where required.

Light portals/Windows - They allow light rays to be importance sampled and at same time allow them to pass through. Now interiors will be much nicer. SHARC doing ton of Multi-bounce here

Lost bastile test until ruined sentinels

No man's wharf - PT mode

Have I somehow managed to fix Jedi Survivor on PC? In this video I return to the troubled PC Version to explain how it still stutters to this day and a potential fix I found that quite dramatically helps the issue. Enjoy this vid! youtu.be/QpF25_fGLB4

Dynamic meshes multi-transforms support, these are not exactly "skinned" and are not single transforms objects, eg : chests, double doors, carts in Aldia keep. Multi-transforms static meshes were added previously however that logic wont work as these are based on game state.

Alpha testing for static meshes. Some meshes which have a center vertex point like this can be normally sampled.

Alonne's Arena finally beat the boss, made some tweaks to sun angle and hue.