Behind the Scenes of Path Tracing coming to 007 First Light

In a free update arriving September 15, PC players on GeForce RTX hardware will be able to switch 007 First Light over to path tracing. Path tracing uses the same approach as offline film rendering, resolving direct light, indirect bounce, reflections, and shadows in a single unified light transport pass – running at real-time frame rates. Getting there meant bringing key NVIDIA GeForce RTX technologies into Glacier: RTX Global Illumination, RTX Path Tracing, Opacity Micro-Maps, and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction.

Games require many different techniques and approximations to simulate every lighting phenomenon in real-time, each with its own rules and failure cases. A lot of an artist's time goes into reconciling them with each other. Path tracing combines all of it into one simulation where light behaves the same way, whether it's the sun shadowed through trees or the reflections off a chandelier in a ballroom. We make use of industry standard technologies to achieve real-time performance: NVIDIA Opacity Micro-Maps (OMMs) to efficiently handle alpha-tested geometry like the many trees in Vietnam and Slovakia, and NVIDIA RTX Global Illumination radiance caching to optimize the number of ray bounces while still achieving high-quality global illumination in complex lighting environments. 

Speaking of complex lighting environments, we need to make smart decisions about which lights are important and for that we use RTX Path Tracing. It builds that choice from feedback, adapting over time to learn which lights actually contribute to what is seen on the screen. The Kensington gala in 007 First Light is the stress test: a room dense with practical light sources and reflective surfaces. RTX Path Tracing means rays are spent on the lights that matter most to the image.

A real–time path tracer produces a sparse, noisy signal, and the denoising step decides whether that reads as cinematic or as static. DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction gives us a single trained model, fed by guide buffers we generate through path–space decomposition, in place of separate denoising and upscaling stages. We're shipping with the latest DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction model, whose second–generation transformer architecture and finer control over temporal accumulation let us tune its response for our content rather than take it as given. This gives us light-accurate, stable and high-quality image even when combined with complex effects and dynamic environments.

Our constraint from the start was that path tracing had to be additive. The rasterized game had to be unaffected, the art direction had to survive the transition, and the amount of extra work asked of artists had to be minimal. Glacier's local iteration is what–you–see–is–what–you–get, and that pillar had to be respected.
In practice that meant a small set of path–tracing–specific overrides – on individual lights, LODs, and materials – rather than a second authoring pass across the game. It also meant accepting where the two renderers simply resolve differently and tuning for it, instead of trying to force one to imitate the other.

The collaboration ran both directions. Our content in 007 First Light was entirely new for NVIDIA's technology in several ways, with features that neither their test scenes nor previous titles had. For example, rapidly strobing lights in our night club scenes were a challenging case for a temporally accumulated radiance cache, and office skyscrapers full of reflective glass panels pushed denoising requirements into territory that took sustained work from both teams to resolve. Some of the improvements NVIDIA's engineers made for 007 First Light are making their way back into their public SDKs, which means not only IOI, but other studios and their future games will be able to benefit as well.

Path tracing will be available on GeForce RTX GPUs, with DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction enabled automatically. DLSS Frame Generation is supported, but not required to play on recommended hardware. Players on other platforms and configurations can continue to run our rasterized renderer, which remains fully supported.
Please see the newly refreshed PC system requirements for details on recommended GeForce RTX hardware to run path tracing.
We're excited for players to see 007 First Light lit this way, and we'll keep pushing on it as the hardware and the tools continue to evolve.