Some info about SEUS PTGI, for those new around here! (Patreon)

Wow. First of all, thank you to all of the new patrons! There's been some buzz about SEUS PTGI lately, and I've seen some confusion out there that I'd like to clear up!

So, first of all, SEUS PTGI (short for Path Traced Global Illumination) is a shaderpack for Minecraft powered by the mod called OptiFine. It doesn't require any special hardware or an RTX card, just a modern GPU with decent horsepower! The ray tracing under the hood powering this shaderpack is software-based and unable to take advantage of RTX RT cores for acceleration. Utilizing RT cores is, for the time being, not possible with OptiFine.

I've been working on it for about a year and hope to get it stable and robust enough to release publicly soon (there are still some compatibility issues on some cards due to variations in graphics drivers and some visual artifacts). However, since I'm really pushing the limits of OptiFine's capabilities and real-time graphics in general, progress at times can be steady. 

Path tracing? Ray tracing? What's the difference, and which does SEUS PTGI use? Well, put simply, ray tracing describes a process where a scene's geometry and information is queried by shooting rays and seeing how they collide with the scene. Ray tracing alone usually involves firing a single or few rays to render effects like hard shadows and reflections.

Path tracing is an application of ray tracing, where typically many rays are traced to gather more information and render more advanced lighting effects, namely Global Illumination. Instead of tracing one light path for a shadow or reflection, the goal of path tracing is to calculate the many potential paths that light can take in a scene, in any direction, with multiple bounces. 

SEUS PTGI does take shortcuts in order to run at a decent frame rate, but, in essence, it indeed uses path tracing (and therefore ray tracing) to achieve lighting quality that simply isn't possible without tracing rays.

If you do decide to support the development of SEUS PTGI and want to try it out for yourself, you can find download links here on my Patreon page. Just check the posts tagged "Release Archives". Please do read the setup requirements in these posts, since SEUS PTGI is picky about how you have things set up!

If you need to report an issue or need help with something, the SEUS Discord server is the place to go!

Thank you again for all of your support!