Reshade Rtgi 0.36.1 May 2026

ReShade RTGI 0.36.1 is not a polished product – it’s a powerful, noisy, slightly janky approximation of ray tracing. But for the price (free) and compatibility (nearly every game), it remains the best way to breathe new life into old lighting engines. Spend 20 minutes tuning it per game, and you’ll see shadowed corners glow with bounced light in ways standard ambient occlusion never could.

Alternatives to try if 0.36.1 feels too limited: Reshade Rtgi 0.36.1

Last tested on ReShade 5.9.2, Windows 11, NVIDIA RTX 3060. Performance varies with resolution and game engine. ReShade RTGI 0

For decades, Global Illumination (GI) has been the "holy grail" of real-time rendering. While rasterization techniques have improved significantly, they struggle to accurately simulate light bouncing (radiosity), often resulting in flat lighting or unrealistic shadows in areas not directly hit by a light source. Last tested on ReShade 5

With the release of version 0.36.1, the RTGI shader by Pascal Gilcher represents one of the most sophisticated implementations of ray tracing available as a post-process effect. Unlike NVIDIA’s RTX, which utilizes dedicated hardware cores (RT cores) for BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) traversal, ReShade RTGI operates entirely in screen space, making it compatible with a wider range of DirectX 9, 10, and 11 titles.

In the ever-evolving world of PC gaming graphics, few mods have generated as much excitement as Pascal "Marty McFly" Gilcher’s Ray Tracing Global Illumination (RTGI) shader. While hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RTX) remains exclusive to newer graphics cards, RTGI has democratized cinematic lighting for thousands of older titles. Among its many iterations, one version stands out as a landmark release: ReShade RTGI 0.36.1.

This article dives deep into what makes version 0.36.1 special, how it differs from standard screen-space effects, the technical requirements, installation steps, and the best settings to transform your games.