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NVIDIA Optix Updated with Mega Geometry Tech, New Neural Texture Compression SDK Released
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."
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."