<p>NVIDIA has released a fork of the Godot game engine that adds full path tracing and RTX support, announced at GDC and available on GitHub under the MIT license.</p>
<h2>What it actually does</h2>
<p>The fork introduces a new Vulkan-based ray tracing renderer, toggled through project settings and the world environment node. It integrates NVIDIA Streamline and DLSS Ray Reconstruction for real-time denoising, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting here - path tracing without denoising is basically unusable in real time.</p>
<p>The visual improvements are most obvious in shadows, reflections, and secondary bounce lighting. 3D artist FR3NKD put together a demo scene using full path tracing with a single directional light, and the result is polished enough that people are mistaking it for Unreal Engine 5 output. Running on an RTX 4080, it hits 60+ FPS.</p>
<h2>Current state and limitations</h2>
<p>This is early. The fork currently has:</p>
<ul>
<li>Heavy noise and visual artifacts in some scenarios</li>
<li>No volumetric fog support</li>
<li>Some broken lighting edge cases</li>
<li>Vulkan only (Direct3D 12 support is planned)</li>
<li>No official build instructions - you need to build from a specific branch and manually copy Streamline SDK DLLs into your project</li>
</ul>
<p>Performance cost runs roughly 10-30% depending on scene complexity, which is actually reasonable for path tracing.</p>
<h2>Where it’s going</h2>
<p>NVIDIA collaborated with core Godot rendering contributors on this, which is a good sign for longevity. The roadmap includes radiance caching, shader execution reordering, opacity maps, and DLSS motion vectors. The longer-term plan is to distribute this as a Godot extension or asset store add-on rather than maintaining a separate fork indefinitely.</p>
<p>Two upcoming Godot titles - <em>Road to Vostok</em> and <em>PVKK</em> - are reportedly in talks with NVIDIA about RTX support, so there may be real games shipping with this sooner than expected.</p>
<p>For now it’s a fork that requires building from source with no hand-holding, so it’s squarely aimed at developers comfortable getting their hands dirty. But the demo results suggest the underlying technology is further along than the rough edges might imply.</p>


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NVIDIA has released a Godot engine fork on GitHub (MIT license) that adds full path tracing and RTX support via a new Vulkan-based ray tracer. It integrates NVIDIA Streamline and DLSS Ray Reconstruction for real-time denoising. Demo results running on an RTX 4080 show 60+ FPS with visually impressive output, though the fork is early-stage with known issues including noise artifacts, no volumetric fog, no Direct3D 12 support, and no official build instructions. NVIDIA collaborated with core Godot rendering contributors, and the roadmap includes radiance caching, shader execution reordering, and eventual distribution as a Godot extension rather than a permanent fork. Two upcoming Godot titles are reportedly in talks to ship with RTX support.

NVIDIA's path-traced Godot fork brings RTX support to the open-source engine