NVIDIA GeForce RTX Interview: Black Myth Wukong, Half-Life 2, DLSS, RTX Remix, and more

As part of the 50th episode of The TT Show, we had the chance to sit down with Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist at NVIDIA and veteran PC gamer, to talk about all things GeForce RTX and PC gaming in 2024. Be sure to check out the full episode of the show for a great conversation about the current state of PC gaming and GPU hardware, AI's role in pushing visual fidelity forward with DLSS, where things might be headed, and more.

Before joining NVIDIA, Jacob spent 17 years working for EVGA, one of NVIDIA's biggest partners for creating high-performance graphics cards for the US market. He was also a GeForce and PC gaming fan, going back to the GeForce 2 in 2000, the early days of full 3D gaming.

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Fast-forward to 2024, and gaming is more significant than ever. One of the most talked-about and played games on the PC front is Black Myth: Wukong from Chinese developer Game Science. NVIDIA has been showcasing this game on its GeForce channels for several years, and this is where our conversation started.

Here are some highlights from the interview, kicking off with Black Myth: Wukong. Again, for more information, watch the full episode of The TT Show, which is embedded below.

Watch the full interview in The TT Show.

Showcasing Black Myth: Wukong for years, its visuals, and NVIDIA's game developer relationship.

Jacob Freeman: "From our perspective, having a good developer relationship is really important. In the case of Black Myth: Wukong, they were going for a very realistic cinematic kind of look, especially with the environments. The best way to achieve that is with Ray Tracing, or in their case, Full Ray Tracing or Path Tracing. That leads to DLSS because in order to have Full Ray Tracing, you need to have DLSS, Frame Generation, to achieve playable frame rates. So, a lot of what they were looking to achieve with the look of the game works well with a lot of the key technologies that we're working on."

Gameplay captured in 4K with a GeForce RTX 4090 with max settings and DLSS enabled.

"We have a whole team of people at NVIDIA who work behind the scenes directly with game developers on the latest game builds, testing them and working directly with them to ensure that it's as high quality as possible and the performance is good, and the image quality is good, especially when they're implementing a lot of the NVIDIA tech like DSS or Path Tracing or Ray Reconstruction."

On the rise of Full Ray Tracing in PC games.

Jacob Freeman: "We're certainly big believers in visually cinematic games, which is why you're seeing a lot of games adopt Ray Tracing and Path Tracing. Star Wars Outlaws has Ray Tracing, Alan Wake 2 has Full Ray Tracing, and Black Myth: Wukong has Full Ray Tracing. Indiana Jones was just announced to have Full Ray Tracing as well. I think that NVIDIA technologies really are key to making that achievable at a playable frame rate."

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"From a developer's perspective, when they implement technology in the games, they want to make sure that a wide variety of cards can support the technology, but at the same time, many developers push the envelope on visual fidelity. With Cyberpunk 2077, they (CD Projekt RED) were the first ones to implement Full Ray Tracing, and at that time, they classified it as a forward-looking feature. You're seeing it more and more in games today because the benefits are pretty clear when you have that feature."

Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, and DLSS 3.5's Ray Reconstruction technology.

Jacob Freeman: "Cyberpunk is not new, but it's still very impressive. Tons of people are playing it today, and it keeps getting better all the time. They were also one of the first ones to implement Ray Reconstruction, a newer technology introduced in DLSS 3.5, which further improves the visual fidelity. For a lot of developers, it is really important to have a visual look for their game. Ray Reconstruction was introduced because denoising ray-traced pixels was challenging, and they wanted the best denoising possible. Ray Reconstruction was able to give them that better visual fidelity. In the case of Cyberpunk, the performance impact is virtually non-existent with Ray Reconstruction. So it's almost like a no-brainer to support it."

"I've been playing a lot of Star Wars Outlaws lately, and for many of the indoor environments in Star Wars, in the Star Wars universe, everything is shiny. When you're inside the Death Star or whatever, everything is shiny, and I think Ray Reconstruction makes just such a huge difference in that game. It's almost hard not to have it."

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"It is pretty remarkable how far we've come in the last five or six years, and I credit a lot of that to DLSS technology. Without DLSS, without frame generation, we had a round table with CDPR some time ago, a year ago or something, and one of the things they mentioned is that without frame generation and these features, they probably wouldn't implement advanced Ray Tracing and Path Tracing. It's just not playable, and frame generation and DLSS are what makes them able to have that level of fidelity at a playable frame rate."

Is DLSS becoming a crutch for poor optimization?

Jacob Freeman: "That came up during the round table that we did with CDPR, and their answer was it didn't make any sense. It's in their best interest to make their game run on as much hardware as possible. They want to sell as many copies as they can, and they want as many people as possible to enjoy the game. So, to say they're using DLSS as an optimization method, it just comes down to the visual fidelity in these games. It's so high, so much higher than what we had three or four years ago. To use these Full Path Tracing features, you need to have DLSS. It's so far beyond what we could do with pre-baked lighting four or five years ago."

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"In the case of DLSS, if you were to take DLSS with 67% scaling, which is DLSS Quality versus a native non-DLSS image, most people probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. In some cases, it looks even better than a TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) image because DLSS is doing a much better job of resolving some of the noise in the image. It is almost kind of like a why would you not use it? At least for me, I'm a huge fan of DLSS, and it makes a lot of sense. AI is benefiting games quite a bit today."

On the future of DLSS, the updates, and the road to DLSS 4.

Jacob Freeman: "Obviously, I can't talk about the specific future of DLSS technology, but you can imagine it's always getting better. And that's the great thing about AI in general: how quickly it evolves, learns, and gets better is pretty staggering. DLSS 1 to DLSS 2 was a huge jump. Then, in DLSS 3, we have Frame Generation, another amazing technology, and then we have 3.5, which adds Ray Reconstruction. So yeah, it keeps getting better and better, and you'll continue to see that."

"There's a lot of things you can do that weren't even thought of before. If you look at Ray Reconstruction, for example, AI is good at denoising a ray-traced image, so I think there are a lot of applications where AI could be used in the future to make our games look even better."

On Half-Life 2: RTX, the RTX Remix tool, and why a mod for one of the biggest PC games of all time is making headlines.

Jacob Freeman: "Most PC gamers would probably say it's (Half-Life 2) their favorite game of all time, certainly in the top five. It's up there for me, and it's not just because I share the same last name with Gordon. This and Quake II are some of my favorite games of all time, and Quake II also got a Path Traced remaster a few years ago. The great thing about Half-Life 2: RTX is the developers wanted to stay true to the game."

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"It's being done by a studio called Orbifold Studios. About a hundred people are working on that title and are all in the modding community. They're all talented artists and developers using the RTX Remix toolkit to 'remix' that game. If you look at the remastered assets and the textures, they're not trying to take Half-Life 2 in a different direction. There's nothing wrong with that, but in the case of Half-Life 2: RTX, they want it to look and feel like Half-Life 2 - just a lot more visually stunning. It's funny when you play the game, you're like, this is how I remember it. And then when you go back and look at Half-Life 2, you're like, wow, it's a night and day difference."

"For example, the textures are much higher quality, like eight times the original texture detail. The actual models are 25 or 30X the amount of detail that is the original game."

RTX Remix as a new way to mod classic games.

Jacob Freeman: "It is amazing how it works because you can take games of a specific era and just take the RTX Remix files and dump them into the games folder, and then it will replace all the lighting with fully Ray Traced lighting. It also adds DLSS 3, Frame Generation, and Ray Reconstruction. It was developed for modders, but it's pretty amazing that it can take you half of the way there by just dropping the files into the folder. And there are a lot of games that you can do that with, including a lot of games from the late 1990s to the early 2000s."

"There are a lot of mods, well over a hundred mods, that are in the works right now that are using RTX Remix. They're all different; some are replacing textures, and some are just replacing lighting. Some of them are replacing models, too. The lighting makes a huge impact, and I think many people don't realize how much lighting impacts how a game looks and feels."

"We've had a lot of people who have looked at it, including a few YouTubers, and they are shocked at how easy it is to use. They're not modders either, but they were able to load up a game and start replacing assets. So it makes it easy to do that, especially for many older games, because often, the tools don't exist anymore to replace assets in the game, or they don't work anymore. RTX Remix helps modders import a scene into RTX Remix, where they can look at individual textures and replace textures; they can use generative AI to change or upscale a texture. It is quite powerful. I'm not a modder, but I can even take a game scene, import it into RTX Remix, and start changing stuff. It's a lot of fun."

Will NVIDIA start showcasing RTx Remix mods as they do for titles with DLSS or new games added to the GeForce NOW library?

Jacob Freeman: "We are certainly looking at doing more of that and highlighting some of the outstanding ones from our side. We need to ensure that we have the publisher rights and all that kind of stuff to promote it through our channels, but those are all avenues we're looking at to make people more aware of these pretty awesome RTX Remix demos that are out there today."

"But a lot of them are still early; it takes a long time if you're going to do a full-blown remaster at the level of Half-Life 2 RTX or some of the others out there. It does take some time. So some of them are, well, most of them are kind of early. As we get closer to them being in a 'full release state,' I think you'll see more of that from us."

On Project G-Assist, NVIDIA's in-game AI Assistant.

Jacob Freeman: "It's an AI assistant for games, and you can think of it like a Wiki for the game, but it's more than that because it can see what you're looking at. Many games are pretty complex today, so one way to use this is, for example, we showed you Project G-Assist in Ark: Survival. You can ask it, how do I tame this dinosaur, or what materials can I use to craft something? You can talk to it or type, but there's a lot more you can do with it."

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"You can also have it provide system information like benchmark data, what kind of latency I am getting, and my frame rate. You can ask how I should optimize my system. You can even ask it to draw you a graph. For example, chart my performance over the last one minute. It will draw you a graph showing your performance. There are almost endless possibilities for how you can use G-Assist, and it's another example of how you can use AI to enhance a game or educate the gamer on the game itself."

The performance side of Project G-Assist sounds invaluable. Could it be integrated into the NVIDIA App?

Jacob Freeman: "We don't have anything to announce on that front, at least right now. The NVIDIA App continues to get more integration with many different NVIDIA software tools. So, potentially, you could see a future in which Project G-Assist will be added. But it's kind of too early to say with any certainty."

Finally, with the continued rise of laptop gaming and the arrival of PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck, we ask if NVIDIA was at least aware that this is one potential PC gaming pillar where it doesn't have a presence.

Jacob Freeman: "I don't have anything to announce. Indeed, I'm well aware of the handheld gaming market. Before, when we talked about some of the thin and light RTX 4060 laptops, they could rival the weight and portability of a handheld device. Laptops are quite capable gaming PCs, and the RTX 4060 is pretty capable. You're not going to max it out at 4K, but for 1080p, even 1440p in some situations, it's perfectly capable of playing most games. Especially when you throw in DLSS or Frame Generation, you can have a really good gaming experience."