The biggest tech convention in the world, the Consumer Electronics Show, recently wrapped so this will be a recap of all the most important advancements for realtime 3D!
Of course the most important announcements of CES came from Nvidia which is the fastest growing company thanks to the AI boom. They announced the next 50 series GPUs which will greatly increase Unreal’s power and bring the price down for last generation GPUs making it more accessible. You can watch this recap of the CEO’s press conference.
On the conference floor Nvidia showed a suite of new tools for graphic developers they are calling Neural Rendering which uses recent advances in AI to increase realtime graphic rendering. In case you do not know, Nvidia has their own version of Unreal Engine 5 where we will be able to try out these new features and tools.
The channel Digital Foundry has the most in depth coverage of Nvidia at CES if you want to take a deep dive, in this letter I will highlight what I think are the most important.
DLSS4 and Multiframe generation was introduced. With DLSS4 you can upscale your game resolution with signficantly less noise than previous upscalers. Multiframe lets you generate extra frames that are not being rendered boosting performance. With the two combined you could have “15 of 16 pixels generated by AI“ according to Nvidia.
Cyberpunk has already been updated to make use of these new features. You can watch this video to see a reaction to it.
Nvidia now has their own Nanite called Mega Geometry! The problem with Nanite is that for ray tracing, path tracing, and shadow casting a simplified version of the static mesh, called a fallback mesh, is used instead of the full geometry version rendered with Nanite. While most of the time this is not noticeable, if you pay close attention you will see that a simplified version of the world is being used to calculate lighting with Lumen.
Mega Geometry gives us near infinite geometry for fully path traced environments without the drawbacks. Of course it is probably a lot more expensive than Nanite which is why Nvidia hopes frame generation and DLSS will offset the cost.
Watch it running in UE5 here in this video.
Finally the last announcement of note is Neural Texture Compression. Gamers have been complaining about the large file size of games in recent years. The majority of the size is due to the expectation of high quality 4K textures for materials. With Neural Texture Compression, developers can ship a game with a low resolution texture. In realtime this texture will be upscaled almost 7 time to meet the high resolution requirements. This will drastically decrease the file size of games!
One of my favorite Unreal creators is RwanLink who reimagines what classic Legend of Zelda games would look like rendered in UE5. Last year his remake of Ocarina of Time’s castle town as a Ghibli environment went viral and was one of the most unique stylized Unreal environments I have seen.
Now he remade the most important cutscenes from Twilight Princess with a realistic style reminiscent of the Wii U Link demo. I highly recommend checking out his work to see the wide range of styles we can use.
That is all for this week stay tune for next time!
Zach Hunter
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