Gaijin Entertainment has announced that War Thunder now supports Path Traced Global Illumination (PTGI), which makes the lighting in the game look much better. The game also supports Frame Generation for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. This means War Thunder should look better and run more smoothly.
As the devs noted, PTGI is simulating light, bouncing around in the scene, and calculates the lighting on surfaces that are indirectly lit. For example, in shadows, indoors, or in valleys.
The game’s old lighting system does a pretty good job, but it has some problems. It uses a simpler and less accurate way to show light in the world, and it doesn’t work very well over long distances. One big issue is something called “light leaking,” which you see a lot in older games. This is when light shows up in places it shouldn’t. The new PTGI system fixes those problems. It stops the light from leaking and makes indoor lighting look much better and more realistic.
The old GI system also has issues during ground battles on a map with cloudy weather or in large indoor areas. This is another issue that PTGI will fix. Moreover, the old GI is working on a simplified scene, and many times it thinks the surface should be lit by the sky when it shouldn’t. PTGI fixes this too. It will simulate more light bounces, and those areas will be lit more naturally.
To prove those claims, Gaijin Entertainment shared some comparison screenshots. You can find them in its official blog post. These will give you a pretty good idea of what PTGI will bring to the table.
But why do the devs call it PTGI and not RTGI? After all, RTGI and PTGI seem quite similar as both of them improve GI. My guess is that PTGI will be a more accurate solution to RTGI.
Gaijin Entertainment also revealed some performance improvements that are available to War Thunder. The newest update helps the game run faster on a wide range of CPUs and GPUs when using Ray Tracing. The update also added support for two new features. These are Opacity Micro Maps and Shader Execution Reordering. If your GPU supports these features, the game will run even better.
All of these are featured in the Leviathans Update, which came out on June 25th.
Have fun!
