Gears of War: E-Day is launching October 6 exclusively for PC and Xbox Series X|S, with the highly anticipated prequel entry in the Gears franchise also set to be a showcase for what's possible in Unreal Engine 5. It's also set to be an RTX showcase, as developer The Coalition has partnered with NVIDIA to bring DLSS 4.5 to the game alongside being one of the first games to launch with RTX Mega Geometry.
In Gears of War: E-Day, RTX Mega Geometry is leveraged to enhance the game's ray-tracing and use of Unreal Engine 5's Nanite virtualized geometry system. Nanite is the big reason why the environments in Gears of War: E-Day are packed with detail, from the creases and rivets in the pants of the non-Locust humans you encounter to the debris, pebbles, and finer detail you can see everywhere.
The only issue is that for ray-traced effects like shadows and reflections, the game uses a low-detail mesh, since the sheer complexity of Nanite game elements makes RT virtually impossible to run at a stable frame rate. This is where RTX Mega Geometry comes in.
It's a technology built to solve this problem: ensuring smooth ray-tracing performance even in scenes with ultra-high detail and complex geometry. So far, RTX Mega Geometry has only been seen in Alan Wake 2, where it boosted RT performance, making its addition to Gears of War: E-Day feel more like a proper debut. As seen in the example below, the low-level mesh on the left becomes a far more detailed base for ray-tracing on the right.
As a result, shadows, reflections, and lighting are more accurate, adding another layer of realism and cinematic immersion to the game's already impressive visuals. RTX Mega Geometry also improves the detail and quality of ray-traced reflections, as seen below.
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RTX Mega Geometry is also set to be included in Remedy's upcoming Control Resonant, which is launching next month. And we'll see more of it in the months and years to come, as Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing 2.0 standard (DXR 2.0) is set to adopt it, where it will bring high-quality ray-traced Nanite visuals to more Unreal Engine 5 games.
