The Witcher 4 will be even better. All thanks to NVIDIA
RTX Mega Geometry was introduced together with graphics cards GeForce RTX 5000. The main task of this solution is more efficient management of the huge number of triangles that make up objects in the scene. The engine groups millions of pieces of geometry into clusters, which are then compressed and cached for many frames. Thanks to this, they can be reused as the player moves around the game world, instead of being recalculated from scratch.
The technology also works on older cards, but slower
This approach allows you to combine very detailed geometry with advanced lighting techniques. In practice, this enables the use of technologies similar to the system Nanite known for its engine Unreal Engine 5but in combination with full path tracing. This means that the scene can be rendered without quality compromises and without the need to mix classic rasterization with ray tracing.
NVIDIA showed off the capabilities of RTX Mega Geometry earlier during a demo presentation Zorahin a scene containing even half a billion polygons. Importantly, the solution will work on all GeForce RTX family cardsalthough the Blackwell architecture offers additional mechanisms to speed up its operation.
The first game to actually use this technology was Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2. Implementation in the engine Northlight brought noticeable benefits – frame rate increased by approximately 5-20%and at the same time managed to reduce VRAM usage by approximately 300 MB. The studio also plans to use this solution in the upcoming game Control Resonantwhich is to serve DLSS 4.5 and path tracing.
The biggest news, however, is integration of the next generation of RTX Mega Geometry in The Witcher 4. The game from CD Projekt RED will once again offer a vast open world, and current materials show that dense, realistic forests will play an important role. That’s it vegetation is one of the biggest challenges for ray tracingbecause the leaves and branches create an extremely complex geometric structure.
To solve this problem, the developers use a new vegetation rendering system based on both RTX Mega Geometry and technology OpacityMicromaps. The first one divides the ray tracing structure into segments and updates only those fragments that are relevant in a given frame. In turn, Opacity Micromaps allows you to analyze translucent elements such as leaves or grass much faster.
In the presented demo you can see a bird’s eye view of a very dense forest composed of millions of objects. The whole thing was brilliantly lit and shaded even at very large distances, which suggests that The Witcher 4 will be one of the most technologically advanced titles using path tracing in AAA games.
