: Unlike native hardware ray tracing (RTX), RTGI is hardware independent . It works by analyzing the game's "depth buffer" to simulate how light bounces off surfaces, meaning it can run on non-RTX cards, though it is still hardware-demanding.

Since the widespread adoption of version 0.33, Pascal Gilcher has continued to refine his shaders. In mid‑2025, he released a major update that introduced several improvements:

By the time 0.33 was released, a large community of preset authors had already created custom .ini files tailored to specific games. Version 0.33 became the baseline for hundreds of presets on Nexus Mods and other modding communities, ensuring easy access to pre‑tuned configurations for everything from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to X‑Plane 11 .

RTGI (Screen Space Ray Traced Global Illumination) is a premium shader developed by Pascal Gilcher (known online as Marty McFly/Martyilla). Unlike native hardware ray tracing (like Nvidia RTX or AMD DXR), which calculates light bouncing off objects across the entire game world via specialized hardware RT cores, RTGI operates in .

Earlier RTGI versions occasionally produced flickering or “sparkly” artifacts, especially in high‑contrast scenes. Version 0.33 tightened the ray‑marching algorithm, resulting in smoother indirect lighting and fewer temporal stability issues. This made the shader far more practical for actual gameplay, rather than just static screenshots.

In the preprocessor settings, set RT_RENDER_SCALE to 0.5 . This forces the shader to calculate ray tracing at half your native resolution, drastically improving FPS with minimal loss in lighting accuracy.

This mechanism samples the game’s overall on-screen color spectrum to simulate realistic ambient sky lighting. This prevents areas from turning into pitch-black voids when direct lighting isn't present. 2. Key Graphical Improvements Offered by RTGI 0.33

: Users can fine-tune "Ray Amount" and "Ray Step Amount" to balance visual fidelity with hardware performance. Performance and Setup

works on the screen space colour and depth buffers only. It cannot “see” objects that are currently off‑screen, nor can it cast rays behind the camera. Because it relies on depth information, it is technically a form of screen‑space global illumination (SSGI), not full scene ray tracing.

Works with most DirectX 9, 10, 11, and 12 games.

RTGI requires depth data to "see" where objects are in 3D space.