Path tracing, as opposed to Ray tracing, is a term typically referring to a ground truth renderer. It does so by accumulating photons on the screen after bouncing them around in a stochastic way, meaning randomly sampled and integrated over time.

In other words, it's photorealistic.

The problem with real time path tracing is that it usually produces a very noisy image, since we can only afford a single photon sample per pixel.

Thanks to NVIDIA's new DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction technology, we can fully denoise the rendered image in a relatively stable manner.

In Archean, we have implemented the path tracer (with ray reconstruction) as a separate renderer that can be toggled in the settings.
This option is only available on NVIDIA graphics cards.
It will work on RTX 2000 series, though it's recommended to use a 4000 series for better performance.


On the left is before this update, on the right is after enabling the Path Tracer and Ray Reconstruction.

Known issues:

• Shadow ghosting and pixel smudging with fast movements
• Blurry terrain when the sun is low
• Very poor performance in vehicles made with unpainted metal blocks
  

• Implemented DLSS Ray Reconstruction and a Fully Path-Traced Renderer (stochastic Ray-Traced ambient lighting, rough metal reflections, and soft shadows from unlimited lights without affecting performance)
• Added an option to rasterize screens of components/dashboard as full resolution overlays to make them clearer and easy to read (enabled by default)
• Dashboards: moved emissive layer to front face instead of back face
• Admin Panel: Fixed CTD when sorting by alias/owner in ascending order with multiple entities having an empty alias/owner
• Increased the Sun's temperature (changes the color of the atmosphere and intensity)