NVIDIA unveiled its RTX Mega Geometry technology during their recent CES 2025 presentation, coinciding with the introduction of various new RTX branches. At the time, Team Green mentioned that Remedy Entertainment would be upgrading their Northlight Engine with RTX Mega Geometry technology. Last week, Digital Foundry published their early impressions of an enhanced version of Alan Wake 2, outlining "clear and measurable" improvements; especially with previous-gen GeForce RTX gaming hardware—in particular, on an RTX 4060 GPU. NVIDIA has released version 9.0 of their OptiX SDK—signalling a wider distribution of the Mega Geometry tech to game development and visualization houses. This new API, for building clusters, is advertised as being able to: "dramatically speed up BVH builds of large meshes."

Late last week, NVIDIA updated its Neural Texture Compression (NTC) toolkit BETA. RTXNTC version 0.5.0's quick start guide outlines the fundamental functions of Team Green's AI-enhanced image compression technology: "(an) algorithm designed to compress all PBR textures used for a single material together. It works best when the texture channels are correlated with each other, for example, detail in the albedo texture corresponds to detail in the normal texture. Up to 16 texture channels can be compressed into one NTC texture set. Typical PBR materials have 9-10 channels: 3x albedo, 3x normal, metalness, roughness, ambient occlusion, opacity."Like the aforementioned Mega Geometry technology, NTC seems to be beneficial for older generations of graphics cards—based on system requirements, NVIDIA recommends that developers implement an "Inference on Load" mode when renderers are targeting "lower-end hardware." At a minimum, "GPU for NTC decompression on load and transcoding to BCn" can be processed by "anything compatible with Shader Model 6," but the guide recommends NVIDIA's Turing generation (RTX 2000 series) or newer.Team Green expects functional but very slow performance when utilizing the minimum required hardware with "GPU for NTC inference on sample"—best results will be generated by NVIDIA Ada (RTX 4000 series) and newer. According to their notes, a major known issue points to lower than expected "Non-CoopVec (DP4a) inference performance" on the just-released Blackwell GPU generation.

NVIDIA: "Alan Wake 2 is the first game to feature our new NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry technology."


Digital Foundry: "But what is Mega Geometry, how does it manifest in Alan Wake 2 and what are the memory, CPU and GPU benefits? Alex Battaglia explains all, finding that—remarkably—RTX Mega Geometry is actually more impactful on RTX 20-series and 30-series GPUs as opposed to the latest and greatest. And finally, what do the new ultra path tracing options in Alan Wake 2 actually do?"