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.
