Good news for graphics developers. NVIDIA just dropped the RTX Kit. It is filled to the brim with tools that could seriously revolutionize both the ways in which games look and perform. With a slight delay, this toolkit is finally live on GitHub. It offers at least an over-the-horizon glance into what the future of real-time rendering will look and feel like.
RTX Neural Shaders (RTXNS): AI-Powered Graphics
Let's discuss the headliner: RTX Neural Shaders, or RTXNS. It's all about infusing machine learning into the graphics pipeline. NVIDIA provides samples that help train your own neural networks. Imagine using AI to enhance shaders. Perhaps doing more complex effects with less traditional code. RTXNS uses the Slang shading language and Vulkan Cooperative Vectors, tapping into the GPU's ML acceleration. It is early days, but the potential here is massive.
Mega Geometry-RTX: Handling Truly Massive Worlds
Ever wondered how games will approach truly gigantic, detailed environments? RTX Mega Geometry could be that answer. Following its appearance in Alan Wake 2, a new technology demonstration is available within the RTX Kit. This technology is designed to efficiently render extremely complex scenes comprising billions of polygons. Just think of how that level of detail might apply to open-world games. This is a leap toward richer, more immersive worlds.
RTX Character Rendering (RTXCR): Realistic Characters
Realistic game characters aren't easy to achieve. See a teaser about path-traced hair and skin in RTX Character Rendering. What's far more interesting, however, is that hardware support for the new Linear-Swept Sphere method to handle hair data is baked into NVIDIA's RTX 50 series GPUs. According to claims by the company, LSS should be significantly faster, as well as more memory efficient for the rendering of animated hair than older methods. We are going to take a first look at RTX Hair with the upcoming Indiana Jones update, apparently. Very cool.
RTX Texture Filtering (RTXTF): Sharper Textures, Less Noise
One of the new entries we hadn't heard about until CES 2025 is called RTX Texture Filtering. It works by using smart sampling and filtering of textures after shading. This reduces visual artifacts and provides a cleaner, sharper image. Just think of this as refining the visual details.
RTX Neural Texture Compression: Smaller Files, Same Quality
Storage space is always an issue, especially with high-resolution textures. RTX Neural Texture Compression applies AI to whittle down the sizes of textures massively. In one demo shown, a reduction from 272MB to a mere 11.37MB was seen. There's a performance trade-off from the AI inference. However, these memory savings might just be the godsend for developers.
Streamline SDK Update: DLSS 4 in Sight?
Finally, NVIDIA released their Streamline SDK to 2.7.2. New features in this version include support for DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and new models for Ray Reconstruction, Frame Generation, and Super Resolution. Could this be the precursor to official DLSS 4 mods? It does make things very interesting for both modders and developers.
