Rendering
This is the largest section of the manual, because rendering is where Vite diverges most from both stock Unreal Engine 4.27 and from UE5.
How the renderer is put together
The pipeline is Unreal Engine 4.27's deferred renderer, inheriting NvRTX Caustics' DirectX 12 and DXR improvements, with Vite's own additions layered on top. The important structural property is that the ray tracing pipeline is agnostic: acceleration structures are built and updated independently of any particular lighting solution, which is what allows DDGI, RTXDI and the various RT effects to coexist and be enabled independently.
That is the opposite of the UE 5.1+ arrangement, where ray tracing scene construction is coupled to Lumen, Nanite and GPU Scene. See Why NvRTX 4.27.
Section contents
Global illumination
Global Illumination — choosing between the available GI solutions
Dynamic DDGI — real-time ray-traced irradiance probe volumes
Static DDGI — baked probe volumes with near-instant bake times
SSGI — screen-space GI, and why it belongs alongside DDGI
Ray tracing
Ray Tracing — overview and the master switches
RTXDI — ray-traced direct lighting for many-light scenes
Surface and geometry
Shading Models — including Callisto BRDF and Toon
Hair Rendering — TressFX
Image quality
Anti-Aliasing — SMAA, FXAA, TAA and MSAA
Upscalers and Frame Generation — DLSS, FSR, XeSS, NIS
Ambient Occlusion — SSAO fast path and HBAO+
Colour Management — ACES, tonemapping and HDR output
Choosing a rendering configuration
The right starting point depends on your performance target. These are the configurations behind the four targets in Performance Targets.
Target | GI | Reflections | Shadows | AO | Geometry | AA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Stylised 4K120 | Dynamic DDGI | Raster / SSR | Cascaded | SSAO fast path | LODs | SMAA / TAA |
Performance 4K60 | DDGI + SSGI | Ray traced | Cascaded | SSAO / HBAO4+ | Tessellation | TAA / SMAA |
Fidelity 4K30 | DDGI + SSGI | Ray traced | Cascaded | HBAO4+ | Tessellation | TAA |
Full RT 1440p30 | DDGI + SSGI | Ray traced | Ray traced | RTAO | Tessellation | TAA |
No-RT hardware | Static DDGI | SSR | Cascaded | SSAO | LODs | TAA / SMAA / FXAA |
Every one of these is a starting point, not a prescription. The console variables for each are documented on the corresponding pages and collected in the Console Variable Reference.