GoKawiilWe took Nvidia's RTX Mega Geometry technology through a series of tests in Alan Wake 2 and the RTX Bonsai Diorama Demo to see how this tech reduces VRAM consumption and eliminates visual artifacts, thus helping pave the way to photorealistic real-time graphics.
In 2018, NVIDIA announced its GeForce RTX line of graphics cards based on the Turing architecture, which would allow for hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing. In November of that year, Battlefield V became the first title to support real-time ray tracing using the Microsoft DirectX Raytracing API (DXR). The game only supported one ray-traced effect – ray-traced reflections.
In 2019, Control launched with support for multiple ray-traced effects – RT reflections, RT transparent reflections, indirect diffuse lighting, RT contact shadows, and RT debris.
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Later, we would see full ray tracing – or path tracing – in games like Quake II RTX, Cyberpunk 2077, and more. In contrast to the hybrid ray tracing solution used in some games, path tracing accurately simulates light in a scene. It does this by sampling a wide range of potential light paths a single ray can follow. This method is also used by the film industry to generate photorealistic visuals in movies.
Path tracing is present in a number of modern games, where it can significantly enhance lighting realism depending on the implementation. In addition to this enhanced lighting, there have also been technological advancements in geometric complexity and density for games. Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite is a virtualized geometry system that can render high-quality and high-density assets in real time with pixel-scale detail and high object counts. Other game engines have similar technologies, such as Micropolygon Geometry in the Anvil Engine.
These advancements in geometric detail require new techniques to ray trace full-quality geometry. That’s where Nvidia's RTX Mega Geometry technology comes in.
What is RTX Mega Geometry?
The Microsoft DXR API was designed years ago, before the level of geometric complexity that can be found in modern games. In DXR, geometry is represented using a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH), which can become expensive to rebuild in dynamic scenes with dense geometry and countless complex animated objects. Fully ray tracing such geometry may require frequent BVH updates, placing significant strains on performance. As a result, developers often rely on lower-quality proxy meshes for ray-traced effects. These simplified representations contain only a fraction of the original detail, leading to artifacts such as incorrect self-occlusion and low-fidelity shadows and reflections.
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