Nvidia’s GDC event showed off some pretty cool stuff coming for future games, and one of the announcements that excited me the most was that Nvidia is teaming up with CD Projekt Red to bring its RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology to The Witcher 4.
There’s no denying that “Mega Geometry Foliage” is a great 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 introduces a “new level of detail system for foliage,” using technology that “selectively updates scenes, reducing memory usage and accelerating performance in a visually transparent way.”
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Essentially, this means that advanced path-following lighting effects – which are heavy on hardware – can be implemented into complex groups of plants and trees, adding realistic animations, lighting and shadows.
Add lighting and shadows that react to each tree, as well as the position of light sources, like the Sun, and you have an incredibly hardware-intensive implementation. This is why most games offer much more basic representations of forests, to the detriment of realism.
Look on it
According to the video, the RTX Mega Geometry foliage “selectively updates scenes, reducing memory usage and accelerating performance in a visually seamless way.” This allows dense forests with “millions” of trees and plants to have “unique animation and precise lighting and shadows in real time.”
Improving graphical details and effects while reducing hardware requirements seems a little too good to be true, but I’ve been impressed with Nvidia’s DLSS and Frame Generation features in the past. These leveraged AI to reduce the hardware load of graphics-intensive games, while keeping image quality close to the same, or sometimes even improved. So I have high hopes for this technology.
Flip a coin to your Witcher (and Nvidia)
Although it’s early days, the examples shown in the video are impressive. Additionally, the announcement that Nvidia will make the technology open source later this year should hopefully mean that we’ll get a decent amount of new games supporting the technology.
One of these games will be (as announced at GDC) The Witcher 4 – one of the games I’m most looking forward to playing 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 traced forests will also be included.
The Witcher game series is set in a world loosely based on Eastern Europe, which means lots of lush forests. The Witcher 3 was not only 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 look like.
This also means that the PC will easily be the platform to play The Witcher 4. While Nvidia will make the RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology open source, it’s very likely that you’ll 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 will likely be a bit cheaper, hopefully support mods, and be playable on my gaming handheld as well as my desktop (plus the small problem that I don’t own any current consoles), means I was still going to play. The Witcher 4 on my PC anyway. I just hope the RAM and GPU prices drop a bit before its release next year.
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