EDIT – This post was briefly live yesterday with a different video that was… heavily flawed. There is an updated video that properly showcases the Pathtracing in action, as well as some details on how to get started with the NVIDIA fork.
EDIT2 – Thanks to community feedback I have learned a bit more about how you can clean up the picture a bit. Details down below in the category Cleaning Up The Rendering.
At GDC 2026 NVIDIA just announced the release of their custom fork of Godot (thanks to StayAtHomeDev for details) that adds RTX support and specifically path tracing. It is currently a fork because it required low level changes to the rendering system and materials, but they hopefully can implement it as a extension or addon in the future. Some details are available from this slide capture StayAtHomeDev tweeted:
Additionally he provided further details of the session in this Reddit comment:
Hey everyone. Didn’t expect this here haha.
So it was implemented immediately, in part, by Claude. But the person behind, from Nvidia, has handled RTX for basically the biggest AAA (Cyberpunk level). It’s his code, converted to work with Vulkan.
That was my understanding from the talk anyway.
And he did utilize previous path tracing PR work done on Godot and some that was committed recently. There were some different ways he wanted it work (not a separate renderer, you just switch it off and on), he needed to adjust how the engine handled materials and depth pass.
There also hinting of having RTX enabled for upcoming Godot games (Road to Vostok and PVKK). Not a lot of info on that tho.
It ended with the repo being opened and MIT and talks of having it be an extension or addon in the asset store. They also collabed with Clay and Bastiaan about the implementation.
It looked impressive and the quality comparison between real-time effects and the path tracing was very apparent.
The fork is available now on the NVIDIA-RTX repository and is under the MIT license (the same as Godot). It is built upon the most current developmental version of Godot.
Cleaning Up The Rendering
There are a group of settings in the World Environment->Raytracing section, a set of packed params:
Labeled are the most important identified settings. By FAR and away the most important setting is parameter 3. It defaults to 0, which seemingly disables denoising. Enabling param 3 to the setting has a pretty profound effect (especially in motion, as it reduces a great deal of the flickering between frames:
It should be noted, changing any of these values can introduce even more rendering artifacts. This technology is very much a work in progress!
Key Links
You can learn more about the NVIDIA Godot fork and see it in action in the video below.
