By Dan Mateescu
Publication Date: 2026-05-09 13:00:00
We took Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry technology through a series of tests in Alan Wake 2 and the RTX Bonsai Diorama Demo to see how this tech reduces VRAM consumption and eliminates visual artifacts, thus helping pave the way to photorealistic real-time graphics.
In 2018, NVIDIA announced its GeForce RTX line of graphics cards based on the Turing architecture, which would allow for hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing. In November of that year, Battlefield V became the first title to support real-time ray tracing using the Microsoft DirectX Raytracing API (DXR). The game only supported one ray-traced effect – ray-traced reflections.
In 2019, Control launched with support for multiple ray-traced effects – RT reflections, RT transparent reflections, indirect diffuse lighting, RT contact shadows, and RT debris.
Later, we would see full ray tracing – or path tracing – in games like Quake II RTX, Cyberpunk 2077, and more. In contrast to the hybrid ray tracing solution used in some games, path tracing accurately simulates light in a scene. It does this by sampling a wide range of potential light paths a single ray can follow. This method is also used by the film industry to generate photorealistic visuals in movies.
Path tracing is present in a number of modern games, where it can significantly enhance lighting realism depending on the implementation. In addition to this enhanced lighting,…