Nvidia's GPUs Have Received a Major Update, but Few Are Mentioning It.
The latest update for Alan Wake II is now available and includes new Nvidia technology that optimizes ray tracing performance across all RTX GPUs.
Alan Wake 2 has released its update 1.2.8, becoming one of the first titles to adopt Nvidia's new RTX Mega Geometry technology. A comparative video, produced by Compusemble and featured by various media outlets, shows that this update reduces VRAM usage by an average of 13% and improves frames per second (fps), all while using an RTX 4090 graphics card. The video showcases versions 1.2.7 and 1.2.8 of the game side by side, conducting a couple of tests where DLAA is used in one and DLSS in the other. The execution is done in 4K with maximum settings on the RTX 4090.
The data clearly shows a decrease in CPU percentages and an increase in frame rates. Although Mega Geometry was launched alongside the new RTX 50 series GPUs as part of Nvidia's RTX kit, this technology is compatible with all RTX cards and reveals significant improvements even in older models. The newly released RTX 5090 and 5080 include fourth-generation ray tracing cores designed to work with Mega Geometry, suggesting that the results will be even more impressive on these GPUs.
RTX Mega Geometry may not be widely known, but it represents a considerable advancement for performance and quality in ray-traced games. This technology increases the number of triangles that developers can trace and reduces the CPU load required to execute it by using artificial intelligence to achieve this. One of the most costly challenges of ray tracing relates to the different levels of detail (LOD) that each object in the game has. As an object gets closer to the camera, it is visualized with a detailed mesh and many triangles, known as LOD 0. As distance increases, the LOD changes, reducing the number of triangles and the level of detail.
Although this practice has been standard for years, the advancement of technologies like ray tracing and Nanite has complicated it. Unreal Engine 5's Nanite system allows for a high degree of geometric complexity, resulting in more triangles and LODs. In games that employ Nanite, there may be hundreds or thousands of LOD changes in each frame. However, every time there is an LOD change, the mesh needs to be rebuilt to apply ray tracing, which is very costly and can cause issues in achieving real-time frame rates.
To address this problem, RTX Mega Geometry updates groups of triangles in batches, intelligently choosing what to update and when, thus optimizing efficiency. The goal is to allow developers using Nanite to ray trace every triangle in their projects without sacrificing frame rates. This means more ray tracing and better performance for users. Currently, this enhancement is exclusive to those with an Nvidia RTX GPU, but it is expected that this technology will expand across the industry in the future. The incorporation of RTX Mega Geometry in Alan Wake 2 is done automatically when the game is updated, making it easy for those with an Nvidia RTX GPU to test it.
