During the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2021, NVIDIA demonstrated its key RTX technologies, from RTXGI to RTXDI and DLSS, running on ARM architecture.
One demo focused on MachineGames’ Wolfenstein: Youngblood, while the other demo titled The Bistro portrayed a detailed urban scene set in France. Both demos were running on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Arm processor. As a reminder, NVIDIA is attempting to purchase ARM, though the deal is still under investigation by regulators including the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
This is the list of the RTX technologies included in these new demos:
- Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses AI to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images for games.
- RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), which lets developers add dynamic lighting to their gaming environments.
- NVIDIA Optix AI-Acceleration Denoiser (NRD), which uses AI to render high-fidelity images faster.
- RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), which optimizes the way applications use graphics memory.
- RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI), which helps recreate the way light bounces around in real-world environments.
The RTXDI, NRD, and RTXMU SDKS for Arm with Linux and Chromium are already available, while those for DLSS and RTXGI will be released soon.
The keenest readers will have noticed a brand new technology, the RTX Memory Utility or RTXMU. This is an open source SDK released today by NVIDIA. Its purpose is to reduce the memory consumption of acceleration structures used by applications under both DirectX Raytracing and Vulkan Ray Tracing APIs.
Save Time
RTXMU reduces the time it takes for a developer to integrate compaction and suballocation into an RTX title.
Eliminate Wasted Memory
For applications using RTXMU, NVIDIA RTX cards get a ~50% reduction in memory footprint.
Prevent Fragmentation
Scenes with thousands of small unique BLAS benefit greatly from suballocation.
Open Source
To ensure we are able to support as many developers as possible, RTXMU will be made available as open source on GitHub.
The following comparisons show a significant memory footprint reduction on GeForce RTX graphics cards when RTXMU is enabled.
NVIDIA also released a new Game Ready driver today, version 471.41. This driver is said to provide the best experience with Red Dead Redemption 2 and Chernobylite when using NVIDIA DLSS.
The latter game, due to launch out of Steam Early Access on July 28th, gets one of the biggest performance boosts yet (up to 80%) when DLSS is enabled at 4K resolution.
As usual with all NVIDIA Game Ready drivers, there are additional fixes only mentioned in the changelog document. Check them out in the below list.
- [Capture One]: Hardware acceleration stops working. [3338552]
- Disabled NOHud/RemoveHud filter from the game Valorant. [3332516]
- [Doom Eternal]: The game may freeze during gameplay. [3331270]
- [League of Legends]: The game may fail to launch. [200744747]
- [HDR]: Mouse cursor color may shift when connected to certain DSC monitors in HDR mode
[200741796] - Ansel DOF filter blurs the entire screen in some games. [3288883]
- Some displays screen resolution limited to 640×480 after driver update. [3330750]
- [HDMI 2.1][8K] HDMI audio playback may become distorted after changing display modes
[3268312] - [RDP] Remote desktop connection to PC with color set to 10-bit will result in corrupted
picture. [3332787] - GPU HDMI audio dropouts may occur when connected to an LG C9 OLED TV [3316495]
