This forces the shader to calculate lighting at half your screen resolution before upscaling it. It saves massive amounts of VRAM and GPU compute power with minimal loss in quality.
Unlike traditional screen-space effects (like SSAO) that only look at nearby pixels, uses ray tracing to simulate how light bounces off surfaces, producing realistic, physically-based indirect lighting in real-time. Key Features of the 2021 RTGI 0.3.3 Release
Enable the DisplayDepth shader in ReShade. You should see a clear grayscale image (left) and a "normal map" (right). reshade ray tracing shader rtgi 033 2021
Optimizing code to lower the massive frame-rate cost associated with screen-space ray tracing. Key Features Introduced and Refined in v0.33 1. Advanced Denoising Infrastructure
So, what makes ReShade Ray Tracing Shader RTGI 0.3.3 so special? Here are some of its key features and enhancements: This forces the shader to calculate lighting at
Unlike SSAO, which simply darkens corners, RTGI calculates "color bleeding"—if a red car drives next to a white wall, the wall will actually take on a soft red hue, simulating light bouncing off the car surface. Installation and Setup (Context: 2021)
The 2021 community found RTGI transformative in titles with static lighting or no GI at all: Key Features of the 2021 RTGI 0
To run RTGI 0.33 smoothly, your system needs to meet specific criteria. Software setup
It combined ambient occlusion (micro-shadows in cracks and corners) with global illumination, preventing objects from looking like they were "floating" in the game world.
Set this to 3 or 4 for gameplay. Only use 7 or higher for paused screenshots.