Up to 96% less memory usage in games — NVIDIA unveils Optix 9 and Neural Texture Compression technologies

The NVIDIA Optix 9 Game Developer Toolkit includes RTX Mega Geometry technology, and the Neural Texture Compression SDK allows you to compress textures and pack them into a single file.

Neural Texture Compression

Neural Texture Compression (NTC) is a way to pack multiple game textures into a small file while preserving their quality. Usually, a material in games (wood, metal, fabric, etc.) consists of several textures that describe its color, texture, relief, and highlights. NTC combines all these textures into a single compressed file, which saves memory and speeds up game output.

Instead of storing the textures in the usual way, NTC uses a small artificial intelligence model to retrieve them from the file as needed. This AI model is fast enough to generate textures in real time during game play. However, it produces harsh, raw textures and may require additional filtering to make the textures look better.

If the game will run on a slower PC or older console, it may be better to decompress the textures when the game is loaded and save them in a more traditional BCn compression format. In general, the technology will work on most video cards. NVIDIA confirms that all Shader Model 6 GPUs will support NTC decompression, but NTC output will be slower on earlier graphics cards. To take advantage of the technology, NVIDIA recommends at least RTX 20, and preferably RTX 40 or higher. The technology works with Vulkan 1.3 and DIrectX12.

According to Compusemble (via Tom`s Hardware), in 1440p resolution with DLSS scaling enabled, the «NTC transcoded to BCn» mode reduced the texture memory size of the test program by 64%, from 272 MB to 98 MB. The «NTC inference on sample» mode reduced the texture size to only 11.37 MB. This means a 95.8% reduction in memory usage compared to the normal compression mode and 88% reduction compared to previous versions of neural compression.

NVIDIA OptiX 9

It is a set of tools that helps create realistic images by simulating the interaction of light with objects. OptiX harnesses the power of NVIDIA graphics cards to make it fast. The technology is suitable not only for game development, but also for film production. The NVIDIA OptiX 9.0.0 release includes:

• Clusters aka Megageometry – API for significantly accelerating the creation of BVH-builds of massive dynamic triangular models (meshes)
• Cooperative Vectors is an API for pfgecre small artificial intelligence networks in OptiX shader programs accelerated by NVIDIA tensor cores
• Hardware-accelerated linear curves on NVIDIA Blackwell graphics cards, as well as a new faster software-based Rocaps curve intersection
• Improved noise reduction quality

The set has been updated for support for the Blackwell RTX 50 series. NVIDIA says the latest February «update will significantly speed up BVH» rendering with Megagometry, also known as RTX Mega Geometry. This technology was recently tested by Digital Foundry in Alan Wake 2, which is one of the first games to support it. As the name implies, this is an RTX-only technology, and AMD and Intel have some catching up to do.

Source: VideoCardz