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Halo Reach has already gotten a ray tracing treatment

Reach is reaching for the advanced lighting

Halo: Reach is now on PC, and you know what that means – it’s time for modders to give us a taste of what the game would look like with modern beauty treatments. Yes, it’s time to see what Xbox 360-era Halo looks like with ray tracing. Halo: Reach mods have brought us an impressive facsimile of the hardware-intensive lighting technique.

This video makes use of Pascal Gilcher’s ReShade technique, which you might’ve seen in action on Yakuza Kiwami 2, GTA5, or Skyrim and The Witcher 3. In short, this shader generates ray tracing-style effects in screen space, which makes the results a little less convincing and a little buggier than a proper, native ray tracing implementation.

Still, Halo: Reach looks darn nice with the new lighting effects. Dark scenes in particular benefit from the illumination provided by items like energy swords, as the light convincingly fills each scene. The outdoor shots shown here are a bit garish for my tastes, but that’s the sort of thing you can certainly tweak through ReShade.

Check out the video below (via Wccftech).

Gilcher’s shader still isn’t publicly available, and right now can only be downloaded by Patreon backers. Halo PC promises to keep becoming an even better venture from here.