NVIDIA is providing Unreal Engine developers with deeper insights into RTX Mega Geometry, a technology unveiled in February to boost geometric detail in ray-traced applications through efficient handling of complex, highly-instanced geometry. The tech has been integrated into the RTX Branch of Unreal Engine 5.6.
Initial coverage of RTX Mega Geometry was limited due to its complexity and the scarcity of implementations; Alan Wake 2 was one of the few early adopters. The technology also faced constraints from limited software support for mesh shaders.
RTX Mega Geometry employs clustered Base-Level Acceleration Structures (BLAS) and partitioned top-level acceleration structures to accelerate the creation of Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) trees. This approach allows for up to 100 times more ray-traced triangles, enabling full ray tracing of highly detailed Nanite geometry while improving real-time photorealism performance in games and cinematic applications.
NVIDIA highlights that RTX Mega Geometry addresses challenges posed by complex ray tracing on intricate geometry, reducing substantial BVH build times, memory footprint, and CPU overhead. The technology intelligently clusters and updates complex geometry in real time for ray tracing calculations, which improves FPS and cuts CPU overhead and VRAM consumption in heavy ray-traced scenes.
The company says it solves the problems posed when complex ray tracing comes up against complex geometry, generating massive BVH structure build times and memory footprint and CPU overhead while still lacking truly complex and dynamic geometry.
While some developers and gamers express a preference for physics advancements over graphics improvements, NVIDIA is set to discuss RTX Mega Geometry in the upcoming Level Up with Nvidia webinar series on September 23. The session will feature a bonsai sample scene utilizing the feature and provide updates on the next NvRTX release. Registration is available on the NVIDIA website.
The company believes RTX Mega Geometry could significantly impact the fidelity of game graphics in future consoles, potentially including the PlayStation 6.
