Nvidia’s GDC event has shown off some interesting things coming to future games, and one of the announcements I’m most excited about is that Nvidia is teaming up with CD Projekt Red to bring its RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology to The witcher 4.
Now, there’s no denying that ‘Mega Geometry Foliage’ is an incredible name, but the ambition behind it is even more exciting: more believable trees, forests, and environments.
As Nvidia explains in a blog post, the RTX Mega Geometry Foliage features a “new level of detail system for foliage,” thanks to technology that “selectively refreshes scenes, reducing memory usage and accelerating performance in a visually fluid way.”
Article continues below.
Basically, it means that advanced path-following lighting effects, which take a heavy toll on hardware, can be implemented on complex groups of plants and trees, adding realistic animations, lights and shadows.
Add lighting and shadows that react to each tree, as well as the position of light sources, such as the Sun, and you have an incredibly hardware-intensive implementation. That’s why most games offer much more basic depictions of forests, at the cost of realism.
Look
According to the video, the RTX Mega Geometry foliage “selectively refreshes scenes, reducing memory usage and speeding up performance in a visually fluid way.” This allows dense forests with ‘millions’ of trees and plants to have “unique animations and accurate real-time lighting and shadows.”
Improving details and graphical effects while lowering hardware requirements sounds too good to be true, but I’ve been impressed with Nvidia’s DLSS and Frame Generation features in the past. These have leveraged AI to reduce the hardware load of graphics-intensive games, while keeping image quality nearly the same or sometimes even improved. So I have high hopes for this technology.
Flip a coin to your Witcher (and Nvidia)
Even though we’re still in its infancy, the examples shown in the video are impressive. Additionally, the announcement that Nvidia will make the technology open source later this year should mean we’ll get a decent number of new games that support the technology.
One of those games will be (as announced at GDC) The witcher 4 – one of the games I’m most excited to play in the future. Cezary Bella, rendering engineer at CD Projekt Red, mentions that the developers are working with Nvidia to bring path tracing to The witcher 4and using RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology, fully routed forests will also be in the game.
The Witcher game series is set in a world loosely based on Eastern Europe, and that means a lot of lush forests. The Witcher 3 It wasn’t just one of my favorite games of all time, it was a graphical showcase, so I’m ridiculously excited to see what the next game will be like.
It also means that the PC will easily be the platform for gaming. The witcher 4. While Nvidia will make the RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology open source, you’ll most likely need an Nvidia GPU to take advantage of it, and both the Xbox and PS5 use AMD hardware.
Of course, the fact that the PC version is probably a (slightly) cheaper, hopefully supports modding, and can be played on my gaming handheld as well as my desktop PC (plus the small detail that I don’t own any current consoles), means that I was always going to be playing it. The witcher 4 on my PC anyway. I just hope the RAM and GPU prices drop even a little before its release next year.
The best laptops for all budgets
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course, you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and tiktok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
