They want to skip the RT phase and go straight to path tracing everything. Its mostly RT reflections because AMD efforts since RDNA 2 and consoles are holding back.
Not saying they'll manage to get
many games to go with the new neural models but much like Turing was a departure, Blackwell is a departure from Ada/Ampere rendering techniques.
On top of new tensor cores, the programmable shaders can now also be small AI networks.
There's no white paper on blackwell as of now
But directx devblog talks a bit on it
Neural Rendering: A New Paradigm in 3D Graphics Programming In the constantly advancing landscape of 3D graphics, neural rendering technology represents a significant evolution. Neural rendering broadly defines the suite of techniques that leverage AI/ML to dramatically transform traditional...
devblogs.microsoft.com
And its not just a fever dream of Nvidia. AMD & Intel are also onboard and working with the HLSL team. The future of rendering is that.
Without it, I assume that neural shaders are just not happening. Turing had made the pipeline effectively a compute one with mesh shaders in its days and now Blackwell is making it into a neural one. Can probably run on older RTX but will have a performance impact as I don't think they have the TOPs for it. You get offline shader rendering in real-time and compressed 6:1 ratio or better.
Only a technical brief for the AI server chips as of now and goes more into rack vs rack rather than a deepdive into the architectures, but we can gather than the new tensor cores can also go into FP4 and they now support acceleration for Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models much like we see with openAI o1 & Deepseek R1.
We have no idea what the 4th gen RT cores bring but likely tailored for Neural cache radiance path tracing.
To me it is. The RTX mega geometry demo and neural shader to be more specific. It might be less flashy than marbles demo, but when you understand what really is going on behind the blackwell demo its a game changer.
RTX geometry first and most interesting part imo. But also the neural shader and later the demo of restir + mega geometry @ 31:45.
Never has geometry been handled like they are doing here to begin with. Nvidia already presented mesh shaders in the past, Alan Wake 2 being the first game to use it, but it now seems that they are about to stream in clusters of meshlets in real-time and change geometry without doing a super heavy BVH recalculation for path tracing. Geometry stays in the pipeline without making a whole heavy recalculation from memory to CPU to GPU, etc. Its avoiding high latency geometry calls from system memory and stays local in GPU.
What does this mean? You know how games always have a dumbed down geometry to help BVH traversal speeds for path tracing or ray tracing?
That's gone.
You can literally throw the entire nanite mesh or a game with mesh shaders into the path tracing. Its unheard of.
Neural radiance cache path tracing was in the tech papers in 2021 and they identified back then bottenecks that would boost the rendering speeds of such a solution so I imagine Blackwell is optimized for it. Half-Life 2 RTX is said to use it and likely they'll be pushing this tech for all path tracing collaborations in the future. Its a lot less noisier than previous path tracing solutions. This combined with Mega geometry which allegedly traces up to 100x more triangles than previous solutions means path tracing should be the norm by a few years down the line.
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