NVIDIA Release RTX Powered Godot Fork

Tomcat

NVIDIA Release RTX Powered Godot Fork

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:

https://gamefromscratch.com/nvidia-release-rtx-powered-godot-fork/

NVIDIA RTX Fork Repository

fire7side

It's got a ways to go from all the fluttering in the video. Looked mostly darker to me. Cool Nvidia is working on it.

kuligs2

nvidia is trying to save face, along with linux driver developer hiring, because people are ditching windows..

Unless we get real time raytracing with no fps penalties, its just a gimmick.. stick to old methods that worked for hundreds of years..

fire7side

kuligs2 Nvidia is getting so much AI hype, it's surprising they are looking at it. I think it's just all the extra money they are getting from the stock price.

JohnLogostini

I have been playing with this for the last several days, and it's massively impressive. I have also been talking with NVIDIA about this, and they intend to develop it to a production-ready state and open a PR to merge it back into Godot. NVIDIA has built the path-tracer itself as a fully GPU-agnostic system, meaning it is not limited to NVIDIA GPUs. At the moment, the denoiser is DLSS Ray Reconstruction, which is limited to NVIDIA, but they are actively working on a second denoiser specifically to support AMD and Intel.

I am working on some demonstration scenes now so people have some stuff to play with, so hopefully I have more to share soon. Here are two demos from the last several days.

JohnLogostini

This is still extremely early, but here's the path tracer running natively on Linux.

kuligs2

there was talk about next gen amd GPUs that comming next year to have better performance (surprisingly) and pathtrace/raytrace .. hope godot will support that part aswell

JohnLogostini

kuligs2 Hopefully, but AMD also says they have something amazing and never comes through.

JohnLogostini

Been running more sets, this is amazing.

JohnLogostini

For some additional context, the rasterized version using SDFGI, SSIL, SSAO, and SSR has been tweaked to look as good as possible for an object of this detail. If I move the camera, there is nonstop popping and visual discontinuities, so even the “bad” version can’t be used in-game. I could fix the popping, but then you don’t get self-occlusion in most areas, so it looks worse than this image. In contrast, Path-Tracing is completely stable and handles everything at a per-pixel level.

MikeCL

JohnLogostini Nice! Haven't had the chance to dive in yet. But this is cool of Nvidia to do. What kind of performance are you getting? And what hardware are you running on?

kuligs2

JohnLogostini Since youre playing with it, can you tell me how did you made it work?

I cloned the RTX fork, then did scons platform=windows it generated me binaries with dll files, but when i launch the editor i dont have raytracing option anywhere..

JohnLogostini

MikeCL It's running at about 126 FPS at 1440p native on an RTX 3090 and an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X.

JohnLogostini

kuligs2 Once you clone the repo, you need to check out the nvidia-pt-dlss branch, then build it. Also, in order to run DLSS, you need to place the binaries from the Streamline SDK into the same folder as Godot. This can also be done post-build.

Download Streamline: https://github.com/NVIDIA-RTX/Streamline/releases/latest
Unzip Streamline
Copy the contents of streamline-sdk\bin\x64\ into the Godot bin folder with the Godot executable. The development folder from Streamline is not needed.

Also, I have it prebuilt if you want. I have been updating this build with all active changes.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_wyA4mCG9Bsiev9PgyKbI7Bq2Q5HhzT/view?usp=sharing

kuligs2

JohnLogostini At first i forgot to witch the branches, then i switched and recompiled, and it didnt work. then i unzipped your stuff from streamline - didnt work..

Maybe there is something not explained somewhere how to compile it..

Now tried your build and still no choice for raytracing...

Are RTX40xx not supported?

Tomcat

This error keeps spamming

Failed to get raytracing pipeline. Aborting render.

Godot Engine v4.7.dev.custom_build (c) 2007-present Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur & Godot Contributors.
--- Debug adapter server started on port 6006 ---
--- GDScript language server started on port 6005 ---
Задать pathtracing_enabled
  ERROR: servers\rendering\renderer_rd\forward_clustered\scene_shader_raytracing.cpp:585 - Failed to compile HG2 closest_hit: Failed parse:
  ERROR: ERROR: 0:2721: 'depth_buffer' : undeclared identifier 
  ERROR: ERROR: 0:2721: '' : missing #endif 
  ERROR: ERROR: 0:2721: '' : compilation terminated 
  ERROR: ERROR: 3 compilation errors.  No code generated.
  ERROR: 
  ERROR: 
  ERROR:

GPU PNY NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000
Win 11 Pro WS.

JohnLogostini

Tomcat Some scenes have issues rendering due to unimplemented features and partially skinned meshes of any kind. I’d recommend testing with something simple and static for now.

Volumatic Vog was being worked on today, and a prototype for skinned meshes was made a few days ago, so hopefully all of this will be resolved soon.

Tomcat

I tried running it on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. Same error:

Failed to get raytracing pipeline. Aborting render.

Godot Engine v4.7.dev.custom_build (c) 2007-present Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur & Godot Contributors.
--- Debug adapter server started on port 6006 ---
--- GDScript language server started on port 6005 ---
Задать pathtracing_enabled
  ERROR: servers\rendering\renderer_rd\forward_clustered\scene_shader_raytracing.cpp:585 - Failed to compile HG2 closest_hit: Failed parse:
  ERROR: ERROR: 0:2721: 'depth_buffer' : undeclared identifier 
  ERROR: ERROR: 0:2721: '' : missing #endif 
  ERROR: ERROR: 0:2721: '' : compilation terminated 
  ERROR: ERROR: 3 compilation errors.  No code generated.
  ERROR: 
  ERROR: 
  ERROR:

So this error isn't caused by the GPU.

JohnLogostini I’d recommend testing with something simple and static for now.

I thought I was running a very simple scene. 🌴 😺

https://godotforums.org/d/40804-tai-chi-taiczicyuan-demo-scene

I’ll wait until at least some movement is supported.

A huge thank you for the build! It’s very convenient and useful, especially for those who can’t do it themselves (like me). 🍻

kuligs2

Tomcat I get no errors, but still no raytracing with his build. 🙁 RTX4070s

Tomcat

kuligs2 but still no raytracing with his build.

Ray tracing is enabled elsewhere:

Cleaning Up The Rendering

There are a group of settings in the World Environment->Raytracing section, a set of packed params:

https://gamefromscratch.com/nvidia-release-rtx-powered-godot-fork/

Hmm… looks like I'm out of luck… until I get a newer GPU. Even though “RTX” is in the name of my GPU.

Задать pathtracing_enabled
  WARNING: servers\rendering\renderer_rd\forward_clustered\render_forward_clustered.cpp:5414 - Raytracing not supported on this device.