Full path tracing might not be such a GPU hog in future, as Nvidia claims over 2x performance improvements in new research

A screenshot from Alan Wake 2 showing the main character walking down a street.

Ray tracing is one of those technologies that's mighty impressive but also seems to take a mighty amount of time to get right. We saw the first proper go at it with the RTX 20-series, and we're now three generations on and still relying on workarounds to achieve global illumination. One technique to help make path traced lighting more efficient is ReSTIR, and now Nvidia researchers claim to have improved its performance by over 2x.

The new research lays claim to an "enhanced" version of the technique(s), called ReSTIR PT Enhanced, and explains how these improvements are made.