Get NVIDIA’s new path tracing fork of the Godot game engine
NVIDIA has released a fork of the Godot game engine capable of path tracing.
The source code of the fork, which implements real-time path tracing under Vulkan, was released on GitHub earlier this week under an open-source MIT license.
An experimental fork of the Godot game engine capable ‘really good’ looking path tracing
As far as we can see, neither NVIDIA nor the Godot team has announced the release publicly, so the credit for publicising it goes to indie game developer and YouTuber StayAtHomeDev.
Yesterday, he posted a video reporting on NVIDIA Senior Developer Technology Engineer Leroy Sikkes’ presentation on the work at GDC 2026.
Sadly, it doesn’t include any footage of the path tracing build, just the still image at the top of this story, but StayAtHomeDev comments that it looked “really good”.
By default, Godot currently uses real-time GI system SDFGI, with reflections and ambient occlusion implemented as screen-space post processing effects, so full path tracing should be quite an improvement in visual quality.
The NVIDIA fork implements path tracing under the cross-platform Vulkan API, so it should be supported on non-NVIDIA GPUs.
Still some way off appearing in an official Godot release
According to StayAtHomeDev, NVIDIA’s work is “not necessarily” going to be submitted as a formal pull request to the Godot team, but the code is obviously available to the developers.
Posts on the Godot subreddit suggest that users have managed to compile and run the source code, although the frame rates they have achieved aren’t great.
StayAtHomeDev’s video also includes the image above of planned future work, which suggests that some important features aren’t currently supported, including volumetrics and decals.
License and system requirements
The source code for NVIDIA’s path tracing fork of Godot is available under a MIT license. There are no compiled binaries, so you will need to build it from the source yourself.
The system requirements should be the same as for Godot itself.
Download NVIDIA’s path tracing fork of Godot from GitHub
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