Nvidia has begun detailing some of the next graphical enhancements you can expect to start seeing in upcoming games, with a particular focus on improving the performance and fidelity of path tracing in large open-world adventures.
Path tracing is the next evolution of traditional ray tracing, introducing better global illumination and lighting to games that support it. It’s also incredibly taxing on hardware, and especially so in worlds where there’s a lot of fine, densely-packed detail in an environment. In its showcase, Nvidia specifically pointed out large forests or intricate architecture has unique challenges for path tracing, which is where its new Mega Geometry system comes into play.
Taking a look at foliage first, Nvidia’s Mega Geometry is able to group geometric data into clusters that can be more efficiently parsed by path-traced passes, decreasing computational load in the process. In this demo, Nvidia showcase a new system they’ve developed to seamlessly transition between level of detail presets while also optimizing the assets, in this case highly detailed trees with distinct animations, to take up less memory and require fewer resources for accurate path tracing.
The results in the video are striking, but not without issues. You can clearly see trees in the distance being reduced to blobs of color, which can make the panning shot look likes it’s smearing at times. It’s clearly a work-in-progress, but one that Nvidia says is already being integrated with engine solutions such as Epic’s Nantite system in Unreal Engine.
Perhaps most exciting is its inclusion in The Witcher 4, which initially showcased this tech during its tech demo reveal last year. Nvidia says Remedy is also planning to include support for Mega Geometry in Control Resonant, which is out this year, and could provide the first look at this next-generation of path-traced visual enhancements.
