Godot Rendering Progress & Priorities: September 2024

With the launch of Godot Engine 4.3, a major release that introduced numerous new nodes and features, support for interactive music, a revamped visual editor, improvements to the 2D toolset, and more, the rendering team has chosen to provide an update on their activities and reassess their priorities.

The developers have shared a list of priorities identified in earlier rendering updates, noting that nearly all of them are either completed or ready to merge. In version 4.3, they fixed over 300 rendering-related bugs, and added support for MSAA, LightmapGI (including baking), resolution scaling, glow, ReflectionProbes, post-process adjustments, and color correction. They also made the D3D12 rendering driver widely available, merged the new Acyclic Render graph, completed the RenderingDeviceDriver refactor, introduced a new CompositorEffects API, made the metal rendering driver available for testing in 4.4, and prepared background pipeline compilation and proper multi-threading in the RenderingDevice for merging in 4.4.

Since nearly all of the previous priorities have been completed, the rendering contributors have begun setting new goals for the upcoming release cycles. Right now, they are most excited about empowering advanced users (especially for VFX) and improving performance. 

You can expect changes in the following areas in the next few releases. Note that there are no dedicated teams for these priorities, so if you're interested, please consider contributing in one of these areas:

• Performance;
• Lightmapping improvements;
• Improving VFX workflow;
• Customized rendering;
• Significantly improve screen-space effects (SSAO, SSIL, SSR, SSS).

Once again, the Godot rendering team is very small and actively encourages more developers to join and contribute to advancing any priorities of their choice.

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