Ahead of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), NVIDIA announced enhancements to its NVIDIA RTX neural rendering technologies, including that neural shaders are coming to Microsoft DirectX preview in April, DLSS 4 hits a major milestone with over 100 games and apps now available, RTX Remix is officially releasing alongside a new playable Half-Life 2 RTX demo, the NVIDIA RTX Kit is receiving major updates with Unreal Engine 5 support for RTX Mega Geometry and RTX Hair, and NVIDIA ACE autonomous game characters are debuting in two titles.
NVIDIA and Microsoft Open Next Era of Gaming With Groundbreaking Neural Shading Technology
NVIDIA and Microsoft revealed that neural shading support will come to DirectX preview in April, unlocking the power of AI Tensor Cores in NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs inside of graphics shaders used to program video games.
“Neural rendering is the future of graphics and we are happy to partner with Microsoft to bring AI to programmable shaders in DirectX. All game developers can use Tensor Cores built into GeForce RTX GPUs to deliver next-gen realism and performance to Windows gaming,” said John Spitzer, NVIDIA VP of Developer Technology.
Neural rendering represents a revolution in graphics programming, using AI alongside traditional rendering techniques to dramatically boost frame rates, enhance image quality, and reduce system resource usage. NVIDIA RTX Neural Shaders SDK enables developers to train their game data and shader code on an RTX AI PC and accelerate their neural representations and model weights with NVIDIA Tensor Cores at runtime. This significantly enhances the performance of neural rendering techniques, allowing for faster and more efficient real-time rendering with Tensor Cores.
“Microsoft is adding Cooperative Vectors support to DirectX and HLSL, starting with a preview this April. This will advance the future of graphics programming by enabling neural rendering across the gaming industry. Unlocking Tensor Cores on NVIDIA RTX will allow developers to fully leverage RTX Neural Shading for richer, more immersive experiences on Windows,” said Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D Dev Manager at Microsoft.
RTX Kit Arrives in Unreal Engine 5
NVIDIA also released Unreal Engine 5 support for RTX Mega Geometry and RTX Hair through NVIDIA RTX Branch of Unreal Engine.
NVIDIA RTX Kit is a suite of neural rendering technologies to ray-trace games with AI, render scenes with immense geometry, and create game characters with photorealistic visuals. NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs feature a major advancement in the acceleration of ray tracing for hair and fur – a new linear swept sphere (LSS) primitive. The new primitive is a step toward rendering high-quality digital humans in real time by replacing typical triangle primitives with spheres that can represent individual strands of hair with better accuracy and performance.
At CES, NVIDIA showcased what’s possible with neural rendering through a stunning technology demo, Zorah. At GDC, an updated Zorah demo, built in Unreal Engine 5, will showcase the latest advancements in neural rendering, featuring RTX Mega Geometry, RTX Hair, ReSTIR Path Tracing, and ReSTIR Direct Illumination.
NVIDIA RTX Remix Officially Released with DLSS 4 and RTX Neural Shaders, Half-Life 2 RTX Playable Demo Available March 18th
A year ago, NVIDIA released RTX Remix in Open Beta, a revolutionary modding platform that enables classic games to be remastered with RTX. Today, NVIDIA is officially releasing an enhanced version of RTX Remix, featuring DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, a host of new RTX Neural Rendering technologies, and numerous community-requested updates, enabling modders to deliver stunning remasters with even better image quality and higher frame rates.
To demonstrate RTX Remix’s capabilities, and the power of the latest RTX innovations, Half-Life 2 owners can download a free Half-Life 2 RTX demo from Steam on March 18th. Showcasing their work in Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt, Half-Life 2 RTX is being developed by four of Half-Life 2’s top mod teams, working together under the banner of Orbifold Studios. Half-Life 2 RTX features full ray tracing, remastered assets, DLSS 4, Reflex, RTX Neural Radiance Cache, RTX Skin and RTX Volumetrics.
Over 100 DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation Games & Apps Out Now, More Coming Soon, Including The Half-Life 2 RTX Demo
DLSS 4 was introduced with the release of GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, and now over 100 games and apps now feature support for DLSS 4 due to the rapid adoption by game developers. This milestone is hitting 2 years quicker than DLSS 3, making it the most rapidly adopted NVIDIA game technology of all time.
DLSS 4 debuted Multi Frame Generation, which uses AI to generate up to three additional frames per traditionally rendered frame, working in unison with the complete suite of DLSS technologies to multiply frame rates by up to 8X over traditional brute-force rendering. This massive performance improvement on GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards and laptops enables gamers to max out visuals at the highest resolutions, and play at incredible frame rates.
In addition to the 100 games and apps available now, Lost Soul Aside, Mecha BREAK, Phantom Blade Zero, Stellar Blade, Tides of Annihilation, and Wild Assault will all launch with DLSS 4, giving GeForce RTX gamers the definitive PC experience in each title.
NVIDIA ACE Autonomous Game Characters Debut This Month In inZOI & NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION
Earlier this year, NVIDIA unveiled AI-powered NVIDIA ACE autonomous game characters, adding autonomous teammates, NPCs, and enemies to games, unlocking a whole new set of gameplay possibilities. Now, these ACE autonomous game characters are making their debut later this month in two titles – inZOI and NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION. In the life simulator inZOI, players can customize ‘Smart Zoi’ NPCs with life goals that in turn use AI to guide behavior and interactions with other NPCs. In NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION, NVIDIA ACE-powered teammates help players battle enemies, hunt for loot, and fight for victory.
“NVIDIA enables game developers to push past expected boundaries with AI technology. NVIDIA ACE in NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION allows us to create AI autonomous teammates running on the device locally that naturally assist the player in their epic battles,” said Zhipeng Hu, Head of Thunder Fire BU, SVP of NetEase corp.
NVIDIA ACE technologies are continuing to advance, incorporating new vision and audio language models, enhancing facial animation with new model architectures, and accelerating game development with updated ACE plugins for Maya and Unreal Engine for offline authoring.
Two upcoming games are leveraging these advancements with Black Vultures: Prey of Greed adding NVIDIA ACE speech and language models and Fate Trigger adding NVIDIA ACE Audio2Face-3D.