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Why it matters: As more high-end games require hardware-accelerated ray tracing, users continue disparaging the technology over its high computational cost and significant performance hit. One of Nvidia’s new software features coming to its RTX 50 series graphics cards aims to reduce that cost while improving visuals, starting with Alan Wake 2.
Tests show that RTX Mega Geometry, a new Nvidia technology recently added to Alan Wake 2, increases framerates and improves image quality in heavily ray-traced scenes. Although Nvidia primarily promotes its latest functionality to sell the newly released RTX 50 series GPUs, older RTX 20 and 30 series cards have shown significantly pronounced improvements from Mega Geometry.
Eurogamer reports that the feature overhauls the interaction between ray tracing and BVH structures to improve performance by lightening the burden on CPUs, GPUs, and VRAM. Depending on the resolution, CPUs like the aging AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti and 3080 can receive frame rate boosts ranging between 10 and 30 percent with path tracing enabled.
The improvement often occurs because Mega Geometry can use up to 300MB less VRAM than older ray tracing APIs. In situations that previously pushed mid-range GPUs just above their VRAM limits, RTX Mega Geometry can help clear the bottleneck. The technology increases efficiency by changing how rays interact with triangles.
Mega Geometry is also more accurate with objects that animate or frequently change polygon counts when players move the camera, making it ideal for Alan Wake 2’s mesh shading implementation. Thus, ray tracing looks better when applied to swaying vegetation, tessellated surfaces, or other moving objects. Although RTX 40 and 50 series cards see no performance benefit from the feature, they still experience improved image quality at no additional cost.
Unsurprisingly, RTX Mega Geometry is exclusive to Nvidia GPUs, but the fundamental concept can work on any graphics card that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Intel and AMD will likely introduce similar functionality.
Alan Wake 2 received Mega Geometry in version 1.2.8. This update also introduced DLSS 4 multi-frame generation and the new AI transformer model that reduces visual artifacts. Mega Geometry kicks in automatically after installing driver version 572.16.
The update also includes a new “Ultra” setting for ray-traced reflections. The above video demonstrates how the game now renders reflections within reflections.
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