Nvidia releases RTXGI for Unreal Engine Marketplace to enable global illumination with RT

RTXGI is superb, it's much faster than other RT powered solutions and looks fantastic. Hope it gets traction.

 

If these were the kinds of demos they started with, people wouldn't have doubted the benefits of RT.

 

Probably it won't see that much long term use, as with UE5 you get Lumen, their own GI system which looks superb so far. But in the meantime, always good to make more tools easily accessible for sure.

 

UE5 manage to compete with hardware raytracing in each of its application: shadows (virtual shadow maps), reflections (lumen), GI (lumen).
The large increase of polygons count target to seamlessly use movie quality assets doesn't help hardware raytracing neither.

 

So will this enable ray tracing in older Unreal Engine titles quite quickly with not to much effort from modders?

 

I am sure Nvidia will also create a plugin for UE5.

Lumen is software-Raytracing and uses hardware RT to make it look a bit better. It's very slow, regardless if it's hardware accelerated or not.

For modern HW-accelerated Raytracing GPUs, RTXGi is the better option as it makes more efficient use of HW-RT. It runs way faster and has less latency, so it's the better choice especially on consoles with their tight frame budgets.

Quality wise, both solutions do offer great and dynamic results. So I really don't see why Lumen should be used over RTXGI when RTXGI is much faster, makes better use of modern hardware, also runs on every kind of hardware, has less latency and also similar multi-bounce quality to Lumen.

By the way, the article is wrong. RTXGI is not in these games that are listed here at all. Raytraced Global Illumination /Diffuse Lighting is not the same as RTXGI, a new solution for raytraced GI.

 

How is Lumen performance today with latest UE5? Will there be games with Lumen used only ?
What kind of GPU do you need for Lumen to run nice?

 

Doesn't Lumen do all these by also using hardware if it's there these days?

 

When i wrote this answer in November 2021, Lumen didn't use the raytracing hardware as far as i know. Epic added hardware ray tracing support for reflections in their internal builds for the Matrix demo, but it wasn't publicly available.

In current version of UE5 (at least on their active development branch) if you have ray tracing hardware available Lumen can use it for highly reflective surfaces which need pixel perfect reflections like mirrors, glass.

Not quite sure if lumen leverage the hardware for Global Illumination on the other hand.