KICAD has been growing on me lately. Now that I use Linux full-time, starting a VM or rebooting into Windows just to use Diptrace was getting annoying. It doesn't run well under WINE (despite what the official website seems to imply), and so I've been spending more and more time in KICAD.

The latest version from the Ubuntu PPA is 5.0.2, though 5.1.0 has been released and is making its way down the pipeline. One of the features in the huge overhaul for version 5 was raytracing. Raytracing has been all over the gamer news because of the technology being hardware accelerated by the latest nVidia graphics cards (the RTX2000 series). So when I saw the option for the 3D render to be rendered with raytracing, I tried it out. Of course, without hardware acceleration, the render takes an order of magnitude or more compared to OpenGL, but the results are pretty awesome!

Take a look at a recent board, the same shot rendered in both OpenGL and with Raytracing:

The board almost looks real! There are still a few kinks to work out (I should maybe try enabling antialiasing) but boy, what an awesome little feature in a free, open-source piece of software!

Give it a try and see what you think!