At the GDC 2021, NVIDIA previewed its enhanced RTX neural rendering features, developed through its collaboration with Microsoft for neural shading support. This enables game developers access to AI Tensor Cores on NVIDIAGeForce RTX GPUs to accelerate neural networks from within a game graphics pipeline via a Microsoft DirectX preview planned for April 2021. Neural shading, a new style of programming, merges AI with traditional rendering, thus improving frame rates, visual quality, and decreased demands on the system itself.

Also, the NVIDIA RTX Kit will receive major updates with Unreal Engine 5 support for the RTX Mega Geometry and RTX Hair features with its suite of neural rendering technologies for game developers. Modders have been given the green light to create stunning remasters of classic games.

The open-source platform NVIDIA RTX Remix has been officially released into the wild. In addition, a demo of a new playable Half-Life 2 RTX , which features the latest neural rendering enhancements, including full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, RTX Neural Radiance Cache RTX Skin, and so forth, is pending release on this Tuesday, March 18. NVIDIA will also be celebrating a significant milestone this year with the release of over 100 available games and apps DLSS 4-enabled.

“Microsoft is adding cooperative vector support to DirectX and HLSL, starting with a preview this April,” said Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D development manager at Microsoft. “This will advance the future of graphics programming by enabling neural rendering across the gaming industry. Unlocking Tensor Cores on NVIDIA RTX will allow developers to fully leverage RTX Neural Shaders for richer, more immersive experiences on Windows.”