Testing The Gutter today in full PT mode. Lot of visibility if all the sconces are lit.

Working on cutscenes, The Facial motion vectors were not captured earlier, but are now captured, note this is not the final lighting setup, Cutscenes have lot of camera switches and light intensity changes.

Undead Hollow - Pre Render img Dark Souls III

Free trade means more choices , quality of products. Euro cars , Pasta and Chocolates will be much more affordable in India. India also gets access to textile industry in exchange for eg. After all the racist and sad news all week. This put a smile on my face.

More temporal gradients work. This surface was having heavy ghosting even with gradients, adjusting the sensitivity by detecting specific cases like if the importance sampled ray was supposed to hit and was obstructed. If done to full screen it will cause false disocclusion.

The latest episode of the DF Retro Super Show is live! 20 years on from 2006, the team look back at what was an amazing year for games - with the PS2 era still firing on all cylinders and the arrival of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii: youtu.be/N1CgSBa4iaI

WIP : Temporal Gradients Boosting and stabilization, here is video of Aldia hall, this hall has moving lights and multiple cages, the gradient is boosted only if a skinned object is hit, additionally the boost is faded over the view range. Bit of trial/error to arrive at decent solution.

PT test in Executioner's arena. Most of the lighting is baked(Path tracing offline). PT real-time matches the Luminosity of that and also ensures character interaction. I use the existing Post process LUT(High contrast) which was shipped in base game.

Doing some spells and effects testing, this is full path tracer mode to verify ghosting/denoising. All effects cast shadows/occlusion by default

Things like this suck for user adoption. The LE Path tracer mode currently requires SM-6.6+, (64-Bit atomics for SHARC performance), which is only available in Win11, additionally new features like OMM in Trace-Inline(which is used in LE pathtracer) is only available in SM6.9+.

WIP : Improving transition when going to area with high sun fog intensity, The 2nd part of video using a simple exp(-density * fixedDistance) as a weighting parameter for the Lerp. Now the light intensity is faded in rather than blowout->settle to lower value

This January I found a vulnerability in the DS2 server code that lets a malicious user crash a player, even without connecting to them. BA 2.06 fixes this issue, it's recommended you download it if you want to play online. For more details, here's Yui's post: www.patreon.com/posts/info-b...

Testing out DLC in DS2LE-PT. These images are lit mostly with just "Windows" similar to the Dragonslayer cathedral. Except when you talk to the queen which has a small spotlight(as per base game).

Testing Aldia Keep for Stability and issues in DS2LE-PT

FOFG - Path tracing mode samples. Now able to capture almost all base game assets correctly. Some features would be required for Shulva, like no-sun yet having ambient sky-cube.

Iron keep was able to capture all the meshes in the outside area correctly now. The lava here is set to emissive and all "Ambient lights" to simulate bounce are disabled in Pathtracing mode

Bloodborne emulation on PC via ShadPS4 has evolved significantly since we last saw it - improved performance, more stability, graphics enhancements and much more: youtu.be/fqOs2chL3NQ

The full lowdown on our latest look at Bloodborne PC emulation via ShadPS4 - 4K at 60fps and beyond is now viable and it's a remarkable experience: www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/01...

I am seeing a mass hypnosis event in real-time on X with related to X changes in creator payments. A lot of ppl are posting their earnings today with some crazy wild numbers which I believe are fabricated, leading to ppl telling others "yeah do more engagement". Which means mostly negative kind.

Fixed correctly adding some of these meshes which use multiple transforms in Ironkeep. Editor will automatically "Bake" meshes in world space, ideally a mesh is in object space and instanced for eg : Gravestones in DS3. These unique geometries are not instanced so no downsides.

"You can't fight back because that's what he wants" is another example of Democrats being huge losers who are inadequate opposition to facism. The messaging doesn't need to be anything other than: We will prosecute everyone, at all levels, involved with human rights abuses and we will abolish ICE.

Missing the Caucasian ethnicity test - 100% to ensure you don't get racially profiled, "Show me papers, because of your accent"

trying out a more realistic style on #degine

Fixed motion vectors capture for dynamic objects which are "not skinned" and are represented by a multiple world transform Here the wheel of the cart has fixed motion vectors in the 2nd image, leading to correct image reconstruction, Motion vectors are very important for Pathtracing and DLSS.

Dark Souls 2 - Looking Glass Knight

Added a editor feature to highlight meshes not in BVH/Shadow world and add them. There are possibilities to "Add all" as well , is not implemented currently as accurate de-duplication needs to be a bit more robust

Light sources(Static) can have a better geometry shape to better fit what they represent in scene, dynamic sources are assigned a sphere/cone automatically with radius as LE works on light position to update the parameters at run time.

Testing out IronKeep, made all the lava emissive here. First image is multi-bounce lighting as the light is bouncing of the walls, ceiling and lighting the character

Betwixt and Firekeepers house, this is Full PT lighting (No Sun), NRD is doing a very nice job of able to denoise the raw image to stable image.

I Interviewed Intel's Tom Petersen and we talked all Things Arc/Battlemage, XeSS 3, Frame Generation, Smoothness, Game Stutters, and how Intel will be approaching Advanced Shader Delivery for its users. Really amazing answers from Tom here, do watch! youtu.be/8ydfKE1dffo

This is the sort of thing that feels made for me. I hope he makes it into a full song! www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLsPN3Q/

Path tracing LGK now also with the new mirror PSR feature. Note some the BVH meshes specifically alpha testing for leaves is not setup yet

Mirror support in PT using PrimarySurfaceReplacement (NRD supports PSR). The Primary surface parameters are replaced by what the mirror sees rather than the camera. Normals, Color data is reprojected into the mirror from surroundings as BVH contains lower resolution data.

Updated screenshots of Cathedral with Path tracing, now the primary window pane acts as a "Sun filter", is not true refraction to save up on performance.

Meshes can be made light sources in ray tracing. This is only a test, colors are baked in that Cathedral pane. Thanks to discord users AbrahamDaBlink for remaking pane mesh and DrNova for the texture edit. I will add texture sampling support for emissive only sources.

Merry Christmas to those celebrating today! Not a white Christmas in Berlin yet (as is the usual to be honest). Is it snowing where you are? If not, maybe enjoy some virtual snow in my evolution of snow rendering video from weeks back 😅 perhaps play some Shadows of the Empire! youtu.be/j3fLyhOm7X8

Torch shadows and lighting are handled special in Path tracer mode. Torch is always sampled, Shadows are rendered considering the size of the light. Shadows are denoised using NRD-Sigma before final composition.

Indirect only Path tracing(Raster local lights) vs Full Path tracing. Long range specular lighting showcased here

Multiple lights all casting shadows for every object with confidence inputs being fed into NRD. I simplified the confidence to only detect Shadow/UnShadowed as NRD handles smooth changes in lighting already.

WIP : Fixing temporal lags in shadow regions using confidence inputs when doing path traced local lights. Temporal gradients are computed by replaying the previous frame path in current bvh and comparing with previous stored inputs.

Implemented mixing Screenspace data with RT BVH world. After a ray hits, first check is Screen-space(Strict tolerances), then SHARC and if both miss it falls back to computing the full lighting, notice the reflections correctly have lighting in case of screen-space failures.

WIP Async Compute(BVH Build with Skinning). To fully load the GPU. The path tracing is done at 1440p as well as the rendering. A bit complicated when mixed with DX11, but was able to save 0.5ms frame-time. As ideally Shadowmap passes can also be overlapped with other compute.

Better utilization of SHARC and Updates to Denoiser(Based on Nvidia NRD). SHARC cache (4 bounces/Quarter Res). Main pass(1 Bounce, SHARC pulls the rest of the bounce info). Without/With SHARC support. 3rd Image is full composite with SHARC support(Ignore grass as that is WIP)

Dynamic BVH Update : Now the cloth bits are in the bvh as well. Here is full comparision of when disabled vs enabled

Skinned characters/weapons are almost fully in the bvh, color is now part of the "Vertex Bake" which is done when the dynamic object is first rendered and cached

Continuing the live stream series "illusory shows Keith (@marrowhyena.bsky.social) NES games". Will tonight be the night he beats Fire N Ice? Tune in now to hang out and find out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNt-...

Skinned BVH Comparision, without and with, the ancient dragon creates lot of occlusion /reflections in scene. Note there is no proper light bleed yet have used a default grey for skinned characters right now.

Animated characters now in BVH. I am still working on the right importance sampling for variance reduction, the noise in the reflection is due to the reflection of the GI lighting mostly.

ARC Raiders has gotten a lot of buzz on PC for being an Unreal Engine game "done right". Does it live up to the hype? Have Embark Studio managed to avoid common issues found in nearly all Unreal Engine titles? Find out in my in-depth PC review with optimised settings! youtu.be/jCWtIIlFXHA

Slowly improving the Path tracer in DS2. Note direct lighting is still analytical, but 2 bounces are done for indirect while sampling the direct radiance from screenspace, if that fails it will sample the sun light right now (with shadow ray). Here is base game vs latest LE