NVIDIA Unleashes Dynamic MFG And Big GeForce Now Upgrades At GDC 2026
First of all, NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation, which the company promised back at CES in January, is launching March 31st. As we wrote back then, this is arguably the "most correct" way to use frame generation, as rather than applying a blanket multiplier to your framerate, whatever it may be, the system instead attempts to interpolate frames to match the refresh rate of your display. It sounds simple, but we bet it was nightmarishly difficult to implement. We can't wait to test this one for ourselves.
Next up are a few game announcements. 007 Last Light, the first James Bond game from Hitman developer IO Interactive, and the secret agent's first video game outing since 2012, is launching with path tracing support on PC. This isn't really a surprise; it's becoming pretty common for high-end AAA PC releases. The recently-released Resident Evil 9 and CAPCOM's upcoming Pragmata will both feature the physically simulated light rendering technique.
Perhaps more surprising is that Remedy's fascinating-looking follow-up to Control, known as Control Resonant, will also feature path tracing. In a certain sense, this isn't surprising at all; both Control and Alan Wake 2 pushed advanced rendering tech, and Alan Wake 2 features a form of path tracing already. Control Resonant is quite a different type of game from those, though; it's a fast-paced brawler with large open environments, neither of which are qualities that particularly suit a path-traced renderer. We're eager to see how it changes the look of the final game, which looks outstanding in trailers.
NVIDIA notes that RTX Mega Geometry is a major factor in making path tracing perform acceptably, with VRAM savings of up to 300MB and a performance gain as high as 20% from implementation of the tech in Alan Wake 2. Mega Geometry, if you aren't familiar, is succinctly summarized as a smarter way to manage geometry testing for ray intersections. It's confirmed for The Witcher 4, and NVIDIA says it is key to enabling that game's incredibly lush forests. Seems like it's time for a new version of the Unigine Valley benchmark, eh?
RTX Remix Gets Major Updates And Serious Community Support
A major part of the presentation is dedicated to NVIDIA's RTX Remix modding package that allows enthusiasts to essentially "hack in" ray-traced lighting and effects into old games. NVIDIA highlights the three games above (Need for Speed: Carbon, Portal 2's Portal Stories: Mel mod, and Call of Duty 2) as having recently received RTX Remix projects, although to our eyes they're in varying states of completeness, as is so often the case with these types of fan-made projects.
That likely won't be a problem with this project, though; NVIDIA seems to have thrown its monetary might behind an RTX Remix mod for the legendary Quake III Arena that sees the game recreated with remodeled assets, updated textures, and of course, path-traced lighting. NVIDIA is using this RTX Remix mod in particular to debut several new features as part of the RTX Remix runtime, including advance particle effects with dynamic animations, randomized elements, and complex gravitational effects like attraction, repulsion, wind, air resistance, collision models, and more.
While it isn't exactly complete, a 15-level demo of the RTX Remix mod for Quake III Arena is available now. Being as it's a mod, it's free, but just like Quake II RTX, you'll have to own the original game to play it. Fortunately, you can pick up the classic title on GOG for just six bucks right now if you don't already own it.
GeForce NOW Continues To Grow With More Games & New Features
NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud gaming service is arguably the best of such services to date, and it continues to get better. The company is adding single sign-on for Gaijin Entertainment (War Thunder) and GOG next month, and games from Xbox Game Pass and Ubisoft+ will get icons to indicate same. Also, VR users on GeForce NOW (did you know you could play VR games on GeForce NOW?) are getting upgraded to 90 FPS, although only on "supported devices," including the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro.
NVIDIA is talking about brand-new AAA games coming to the service, including extraction shooter Active Matter, gritty racing-brawler hybrid Samson: A Tyndalston Story, the aforementioned Control Resonant, Pearl Abyss' Crimson Desert, and the just-released Resident Evil Requiem.
Perhaps the most on-topic news for the Game Developers' Conference is that NVIDIA is introducing a "Cloud Playtest" feature to GeForce NOW that allows game developers to securely test their game on the cloud service with internal, external, and press-only playtest options. NVIDIA says that developers can "capture gameplay, webcam, and controller inputs," and have "full start and end scheduling capabilities." Apparently many studios are already making use of the feature, including big names like Activision, 2K, TechLand, Ubisoft, and WB.
Finally, we couldn't end an NVIDIA presentation without talking about AI just a little bit. NVIDIA wants folks to know that the impenetrable node-based ComfyUI tool for state-of-the-art AI image and video generation now has a new fully optional "App View" UI that NVIDIA says is much easier to use. It supports RTX Video Super Resolution upscaling, which allows videos to be upscaled all the way to 4K at real-time speeds, meaning you don't have to wait tens of minutes for your ten second video clip to get upscaled.
Along with that, NVIDIA's released variants of Lightricks' LTX-2.3 text-to-video and Black Forest Labs' FLUX.2 Klein text-to-image models that are quantized down to FP8 and NVFP4. These models reduce output quality in exchange for massive performance improvements, as you can see in NVIDIA's chart before. They also require drastically less video RAM, which means you might have a chance of running them on something that isn't an RTX PRO 6000 card.
Overall, these are some pretty sweet announcements; dynamic MFG may just make frame generation cool, and we're stoked to try out that Q3 RTX Remix demo. None of this is new hardware as we might hope, but NVIDIA promised "a new chip that the world has never seen before" at GTC, so maybe we'll see something fascinating next week.
