Some boss arenas in DS3LE-PT

Translucent shadows in DS2LE - PT. Already had previously demoed it in DS3.

Transclucent Windows/Foliage SSS, also some foliage tex edits from @triviavanille.bsky.social

Twin princes

Sun transclucent shadows and much better window support(sky lighting) in DSLE-PT. Will also be updating DS2LE (Few windows in Drangleic castle later)

DSLE - Editor feature/Subsurface. These meshes are "Static" but are not rendered as normal foliage. So added a feature to mark the Base game meshes as "Foliage", which disables screen-space shadows and also enables transmission/SSS on the leaf meshes

Large emissive meshes. 100k triangles, emit light and shadows, however importance sampling is not done by not including them in LightBVH, so the normal BRDF sampling catches them. This makes them essentially free of cost as the path tracer picks the emission based on the hit. Descriptions below

Implemented Caching mechanism for Skinned objects. Now the BLAS is rebuilt only if the mesh has changed enough. The build time drops from 5-6ms down to 0.5ms . Without caching it dropped to 45FPS here. LE uses double buffering and Async build as well for GPU.

DS3LE-PT Undead settlement.

3/3. I unload/reload Lothric wall BVH in LE, the LOD's and the level match.

2/2. Firelink Level when character is in Lothric wall bonfire

Darksouls3 has excellent LOD placement and many places are visible from each other zones. Firelink/Lothric wall are actually fully connected too. This is one instance. Similar behavior like Lothric wall LOD is correctly placed from COTD/Cruxifion woods 1/1

Working on improving Foliage shading with subsurface and transmission. DS2LE is using Beubeu Faraam Preset for testing and DS3LE is WIP for release end of year. Thanks to NRD Author Dimitrii Zhdan for guidance on changes with updates to NRD-Sample

Integrating OMM , the latest DXR 1.2 features in LE. Left is AlphaTesting in Shader(Max 5 tries). Right is OMM for the meshes(2 state) and Subdivision level of 6. It saves about 2.5ms to 3ms. Yet to optimize fully like arranging OMM buffers contigously for all meshes.

Things we already knew, Just say this post, not sure if the account is on Bluesky

Darksouls3 Pathtracing. Archdragon Peak

DS3-PT. Lothric wall progress. DS3 areas are much brighter than DS2. I held back sun power a lot in DS2. Aerie/Loyce are probably only 2 places where sun is >10000 lux. Most places are cloud or dark.

DS3 - Pathtracing. LightPortals placed in this room to capture windows/doors and cut the ambient lights.

Working on PT in DX12, made me understand CPU/GPU timelines lot better. DS3 uses deferred command lists to render. LE overrides camera for Jitter/ReverseZ and also for editor. Jitter/ReverseZ are ensured that they are updated, UpdateSubResource was done during draw-call while tracking dirty flags.

DS3 - Pathtracing, Enabling and integrated features. Volumetrics are now integrated(Note VFOG Shadows are raster). Some out door shots as well, Almost all of firelink is now in BVH

For Stats. DS3 Firelink alone is 150MB BVH Package, while whole of DS2 is 280MB BVH Package. As a whole I have yet to exceed 5ms trace time(very similar to fofg in DS2) as shown in image its at native res

DS3-PT Early WIP. LE Is able to scale up to DS3 Geo.

4/4 - PT Main, FullRes Path tracer uses the GBuffer data to reconstructs the primary hit. Handles mirror surfaces, local light sources(Light BVH sampling), Uses stochastic selection of Diffuse/Spec. Image courtesy of @fromsoftserve.bsky.social

While studying SER(Shader Execution Reordering), I came across a blog which showed that Pipeline tracing i,e (TraceRay) is faster than Inline tracing(RayQuery) on AMD GPU, SER requires PipelineTracing(Dispatch Rays) call. AMD GPU's see a 10-25% speedup using TraceRay vs RayQuery.

Thanks to Dmitrii Zhdan(NRD Author) for including the Cavity shadows which I had showcased earlier now as part of NRD Frontend. As mentioned earlier It works amazing with NRD-SH modes when combined with Parallax mapping.

DS2 SOFTS vs LE PT with Beubeu work. Beubeu environment composition is really excellent and consistent, he has done this across the game

Lights associated with Pharos lock stones in DS2LE these are kept as is :). I love this concept in DS2, Pursuer fight below servants quarters becomes much easier with this or detect ambushes in plain sight.

A small note. I personally think DS2 was ahead of its time in level design, the coherency of lighting setup done in Base game DS2, there is a sconce always before dark entrances. I cannot claim to know fully what was the original intent, regardless this is something which excited me to build PT.

Known issues with Path tracing build on left. Make sure to also enable HWRT-Sunshadows and explore the Path/Ray counts (importance sample). All your perf needs are in Shading/Quality/Performance under User setttings.

DS2LE Path tracing build is now on Nexus as V_0.1. Here are some sample shots. Whole game should be playable end to end. Thanks to all the members from community who were part of the project.