The video provides an update on Star Citizen’s global illumination (GI) system, focusing on recent developments shared by Ben Perry, a developer deeply involved in the project. Ben has been regularly updating the community since 2023, showcasing the progress of their ray-traced global illumination technology at events like CitizenCon 2024. The GI system in Star Citizen is based on AMD’s open-source GI 1.0 SDK, which provides a foundation for real-time global illumination in games. However, CIG has been building their own custom solution on top of this, rather than simply adopting the latest AMD GI 1.2 update, due to specific game requirements and performance considerations.
Ben explains that while AMD’s GI 1.2 introduces improvements like multi-bounce lighting, CIG cannot just integrate it directly because the stock AMD code has trade-offs in responsiveness, stability, and contains errors that CIG has already fixed in their own implementation. Additionally, Star Citizen’s unique lighting needs—such as matching surface lighting calculations to the main lighting pass and handling shadows and light masking—require custom shaders and game-specific tweaks. From a performance standpoint, it’s easier for CIG to optimize and maintain their own codebase rather than rely on an unmodified AMD sample.
Currently, the global illumination system is in the optimization phase, where the team is focused on reducing the high computational cost of ray tracing to improve frame times. Ben mentions that while the major algorithmic improvements are done, they are now in the “painful profiling and squeezing” stage, trying to balance memory usage and performance across a wide range of hardware. This process is crucial before the GI system can be considered ready for broader release, especially since ray tracing is inherently expensive and challenging to optimize in any game.
One key reason CIG is investing heavily in ray-traced GI is the sheer scale of Star Citizen’s universe. Manually lighting the thousands of locations across planets and environments is impossible for artists to manage. Automated global illumination allows the game to dynamically and realistically light areas that no artist has visited or adjusted, maintaining visual fidelity and immersion at scale. This approach also supports the procedural placement of biomes, vegetation, and settlements, ensuring consistent and believable lighting across the vast game world.
Looking ahead, the priority is to get the GI system performant enough for Squadron 42, Star Citizen’s single-player campaign, before integrating it fully into the persistent universe (PU). Ben is focused on fixing bugs and edge cases in the more controlled environment of Squadron 42, which is easier to optimize than the open-ended PU. While no specific timeline is given, the update suggests that an early 2026 release for Squadron 42 is unlikely, as significant work remains. CIG hopes to release a tech preview of the GI system to gather community feedback and further refine the feature before its full rollout.
