Improve SDFGI reflection quality (proposal for Godot 4.6)

[Eagle6393]

First of all, thank you for your amazing work — in Godot 4.5, the rendering system (especially ray tracing) looks absolutely stunning. It’s a huge step forward for an open-source engine!

However, I’ve noticed that SDFGI reflection quality remains a weak point. Reflections often appear blurry and lack fine detail, which makes them look less realistic — especially in bright scenes or when the camera is close to reflective surfaces.

While SSR can sometimes be used as an alternative, it often produces sharp, fragmented reflections and visible artifacts, especially during camera movement. That’s why I believe improving SDFGI reflections directly would be a much better direction for future updates.

It would be great if in a future version (for example, Godot 4.6) we could have:

higher reflection resolution in SDFGI;

more quality parameters (like reflection_detail, trace_precision, sample_count);

improved reflection filtering, preserving small surface details without over-blurring;

cleaner, more realistic reflections comparable to those in engines like Unreal Engine 5.

Such improvements would make a huge difference — it could be one of the most impressive new features in the next release and a true leap forward in visual realism.
I’m developing a realistic racing game, and high-quality reflections are essential for achieving a beautiful, immersive look.
If SDFGI reflections could become sharper and more detailed in Godot 4.6, it would be absolutely amazing.

Thank you so much for your continuous effort and dedication to making Godot better! 🙌

[Calinou]

HDDAGI aims to improve reflection quality (while still being a software approach, i.e. no hardware raytracing used), but its development is on standby.

Note that if you want truly accurate reflections, you need hardware raytracing as it's triangle-based as opposed to a more crude SDF-based or voxel-based approach. Planar reflections can be used as an alternative, but only in specific circumstances (water, mirrors, etc).