As part of its RTX Blackwell and GeForce RTX 50 Series unveiling, NVIDIA announced RTX Neural Shaders, which is all about leveraging AI to improve rendering - from texture compression to reduce VRAM requirements to RTX Mega Geometry, which is all about dramatically increasing the detail in ray-traced scenes alongside improving performance.
At CES 2025, we saw demos of RTX Neural Shaders up close, and the results blew us away. From its implementation in Half-Life 2 RTX Remix and Remedy's Alan Wake 2, we won't have to wait long to see it live in an actual game. Alan Wake 2 is set to get a massive DLSS 4 and RTX Mega Geometry update to coincide with the GeForce RTX 50 Series launch.
Without getting too technical, RTX Mega Geometry can transform a complex scene of up to 50 million triangles or polygons into a scene with over 500 million. The technology can be seen in NVIDIA's impressive Zorah demo - with Remedy adding it to Alan Wake 2 to boost the game's path tracing performance, VRAM requirements, and image quality all at once.
It's pretty amazing tech. "RTX Mega Geometry intelligently clusters and updates complex geometry for ray tracing calculations in real-time, reducing CPU overhead," NVIDIA writes. "This improves FPS and reduces VRAM consumption in heavy ray-traced scenes." More complex lighting, more detailed objects, better ray-tracing quality, and improved performance.
In typical Remedy fashion, the studio is taking the increased performance headroom to introduce a new Ultra quality level Ray Tracing preset that adds "fully ray-traced refractions, fully ray-traced transparent reflections, and higher quality fully ray-traced indirect lighting." At CES 2025, we saw a preview build of Alan Wake 2 with DLSS 4, and these features are up and running. It was impressive, to say the least, because the new DLSS Transformer model made the 4K 'Performance' preset look as good as the 'Quality' preset of the previous AI model.
Best of all, these features will be available for all GeForce RTX owners.
