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Microsoft has detailed two new DirectX Raytracing features, Clustered Geometry and Partitioned TLAS, now in preview, designed to avoid rebuilding ray tracing acceleration structures from scratch every frame. In Microsoft's own test on a Radeon RX 9070, switching to clustered geometry raised frame rate from 1.2 to 79 fps and cut memory used for those structures by about 90%, from roughly 7.5GB to 774MB.
Modern AI upscaling tools from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel—DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 and XeSS—now render games at lower internal resolutions before using deep learning to upscale them, delivering image quality comparable to native resolution while significantly boosting frame rates. NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation can push frame rates past 200fps in titles like Hogwarts Legacy using its x6 modifier, though the writer notes it introduces noticeable input latency, while earlier x2 and x3 modifiers perform well with fewer visual artifacts.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting, shadows and reflections by tracing light rays, in contrast to older rasterization and screen-space reflection methods used in non-RT titles. According to Steam Hardware Survey data cited in the piece, NVIDIA's RTX 5070 is currently the most-used graphics card, indicating many PC gamers now own hardware capable of handling ray tracing. The author, who uses an RTX 5090 with DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, says gamers on older cards like the RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600 XT should disable ray tracing and prioritize stable frame rates instead.
Several software options are available for assessing different aspects of PC performance. 3DMark offers free and premium versions for GPU benchmarking, while Superposition provides stress testing with visual effects. Cinebench remains the standard for CPU performance, and CrystalDiskMark is used to evaluate SSD read/write speeds.
NVIDIA released an updated version of its open-source vk_lod_clusters sample featuring a refreshed 1.6-billion-triangle Zorah scene rendered with path tracing and clustered raytracing. The new glTF scene data totals about 32 GB, down slightly from 36 GB last year, despite adding a full attribute set and textures, largely because processing now relies on meshoptimizer's clusterlod.h module. The author, who previously documented processing the original Zorah scene, has since contributed improvements to meshoptimizer's hierarchical clustered LOD support and is writing about the updated pipeline's other aspects beyond processing speed.
CD Projekt Red has released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered as a free update for existing owners on PC and modern consoles, alongside a native Nintendo Switch 2 version. The remaster overhauls combat, rebalances the skill tree, and upgrades REDengine 3 to support ray tracing and path tracing, improved textures, foliage, lighting and a new photo mode. Reviewers have begun benchmarking GPU performance in the remaster, testing cards from Nvidia's RTX 5090 down to Intel's Arc B580 in the demanding Novigrad city area.
On this date in 2018, Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the first consumer GPUs built on the Turing architecture with dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing. CEO Jensen Huang touted the launch as ushering in a new era of graphical realism, though the mainstream RTX 2070 didn't arrive until October and few games initially supported the new capability. The RTX 2080 outperformed the previous-generation GTX 1080 Ti but launched at a higher price of $799 for the Founders Edition.
Arm has launched the Mali G2-Ultra NX, described as its first AI-native Mali GPU, which embeds dedicated neural accelerators directly into shader cores alongside a new execution engine and third-generation ray tracing hardware. The design lets neural graphics workloads run in parallel with traditional graphics and compute tasks, sharing memory and cache resources to cut data movement and power use while aiming for desktop-quality visuals on phones.
A fresh round of testing pits the Radeon RX 9070 XT against the GeForce RTX 5070, replacing the earlier RTX 5070 Ti comparison now that pricing has shifted. The 9070 XT sells for roughly $730-$750 while the RTX 5070 starts near $800, giving Nvidia's card about a 9% price premium. Across games like 007 First Light, the 9070 XT posted performance leads of 36% to 46% over the RTX 5070.
Gaming monitor buyers are advised to stick with 4K (3840x2160) rather than jump to 5K (5120x2880) displays, since 5K's extra pixel density mainly benefits photo and video professionals rather than gamers. Achieving smooth 4K gaming still requires powerful GPUs like Nvidia's RTX 4070 or AMD's RX 9070 XT, with top-tier cards such as the RTX 5080 or 5090 needed for ray-traced titles at native resolution with high frame rates. Upscaling tools like DLSS and FSR help lower-end systems approximate native 4K quality without the full performance cost.
NVIDIA is launching DLSS 5, its latest AI upscaling technology, alongside NBA 2K27 on September 3. Early demos from Resident Evil: Requiem and Starfield drew heavy criticism for producing unnatural, over-processed character models, though NBA 2K27's implementation reportedly applies the effect more subtly with improved shadows and texture depth. The feature is exclusive to NVIDIA's RTX 50-series graphics cards.
An unfinished version of Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 feature, already nicknamed 'slop tracing' by critics, leaked online and modders tested it on classic games like Halo: Combat Evolved. The results showed blotchy, over-processed visuals and uncanny hyperrealistic faces that stripped away the games' original look, and one tester reported it also sharply reduced frame rates when tried on Final Fantasy.