Custom Forest Engine Delivers Stunning Visuals at 130 FPS on an RTX 3080 at 1440p, Without Hardware Ray Tracing.

While modern game engines continue pushing graphical fidelity at an increasingly demanding performance cost, an independent developer has demonstrated what a highly specialized rendering engine can achieve with relatively modest hardware. The results are impressive, particularly considering the sheer density of the vegetation being rendered.

Game developer and modder Toni Macaroni has showcased a breathtaking forest environment powered by a largely handwritten custom engine, reportedly averaging 130 FPS at 1440p on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. The demonstration, available on YouTube and recently shared on Reddit's r/pcmasterrace community, features sprawling forests, dense undergrowth, impressive draw distances, and remarkably convincing natural lighting.

According to the figures shared alongside the demonstration, performance varies considerably depending on the camera position:

- Average performance: Approximately 130 FPS

- Aerial views: Up to 200 FPS

- Dense forest environments: Around 80 FPS

These are impressive results for the six-year-old RTX 3080, particularly considering the sheer density and geometric complexity of the foliage rendered throughout the demonstration. However, the figures are developer-reported rather than independently verified, and the precise rendering settings and upscaling configuration have not been established.

What makes this custom forest engine particularly interesting is its underlying rendering architecture. According to the technical details accompanying the showcase, it uses clustered levels of detail (CLODs), Nanite-like virtual geometry, and voxel-based representations of distant vegetation, rather than traditional impostors. Extremely distant objects are further simplified using proxies that eliminate unnecessary per-instance data.

The lighting system is equally noteworthy, combining screen-space techniques with voxel-based global illumination without relying on hardware-accelerated ray tracing. This approach is reminiscent of the Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) technology employed by Warhorse Studios in its heavily modified CryEngine powering Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. This helps deliver convincing indirect lighting while avoiding some of the computational overhead associated with more demanding software (or hardware) ray-traced solutions.

In an earlier X post, Toni Macaroni revealed that the engine had been under development for approximately seven months, targeting enormous environments filled with high-polygon vegetation. One example reportedly features around one million instances and four million triangles.

Interestingly, this is not the developer's first impressive forest demonstration. Back in August 2025, 80 Level covered another environment created using Godot, which reportedly achieved around 170 FPS uncapped on an RTX 3080. That earlier project relied heavily on custom vegetation systems and Houdini-assisted terrain generation, highlighting the developer's existing experience with large-scale environmental rendering.

Naturally, there are some important caveats. A dedicated rendering demonstration is not directly comparable to a complete game, where character animation, physics, AI, gameplay systems, and additional CPU workloads can substantially affect performance. Nevertheless, the showcase provides a compelling example of what careful engineering and a purpose-built rendering pipeline can accomplish.

The developer maintains an active GitHub profile containing numerous publicly available modding projects, although we could not identify a public repository or downloadable build for this particular engine.

For now, the demonstration remains an intriguing technical showcase rather than a publicly available engine. Hopefully, Toni Macaroni will eventually provide a more detailed breakdown of the rendering pipeline and its performance characteristics.

News Source: r/pcmasterrace subreddit

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