NVIDIA's Bonsai Diorama Demo Shows Off RTX Mega Geometry For Future Games
NVIDIA is determined to share the fruits of its labor with Unreal Engine 5 developers, and has now released a Bonsai Diorama demo showcasing several features, including RTX Mega Geometry, to the public.
Before AMD users get too concerned: no, RTX Mega Geometry won't make an end product NVIDIA-exclusive—rather, it's meant to accelerate the Unreal Engine 5 development pipeline, in particular for games utilizing Unreal Engine 5's Nanite renderer. Nanite is a flagship feature of Unreal Engine 5 that dynamically scales the complexity of 3D geometry based on distance to the camera, with the goal of rendering no more than one polygon per pixel. While reports of its performance gains are hotly contested, its benefits for fidelity are undeniable—and when combined with Unreal Engine 5's Lumen (hardware and software ray tracing), it can turn around some truly next-gen visuals, as we've seen with The Witcher 4.
So, what is RTX Mega Geometry exactly? Essentially, RTX Mega Geometry works with Nanite to perform real-time ray tracing on full-detail Nanite meshes. This alleviates issues like false shadows and low quality mesh detail in reflections. RTX Mega Geometry, as well as NVIDIA DLSS 4 features including upscaling, ray reconstruction, and Frame Generation are all fully toggle-able in the Bonsai Diorama demo, allowing users and developers to toggle features at will and see the difference with and without them in a fully path-traced environment.
Besides DLSS 4 and RTX Mega Geometry, the Bonsai Diorama demo also showcases ReSTIR PT, though since ReSTIR PT is responsible for path tracing it is not toggle-able like the other features showcased by the demo.
For those interested in checking it out themselves, the NVIDIA Bonsai Diorama demo is freely available to the public as part of the latest NvRTX (NVIDIA's Unreal Engine 5 branch) release and can be downloaded alongside other RTX Technology Showcases.
While you will need a powerful NVIDIA GPU to run these demonstrations on your hardware, their free availability to the public is sure to delight enthusiasts and developers alike. To me, the aesthetics are particularly reminiscent of the classic Unigine Heaven GPU benchmark for pre-DirectX 12 GPUs, and the demo should prove similarly punishing to run with all bells and whistles enabled on most modern hardware.
Image Credit: NVIDIA
