Nvidia unveils 50 Series upgrades like RTX Remix inside Half-Life 2 RTX demo ahead of GDC
Ahead of the Game Developers Conference next week, Nvidia shared more details on the power of its latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards.
Jason Paul, vice president of the GeForce Platform Technology at Nvidia, said that demand is off the charts for the 50 series graphics processing units (GPUs). In the first five weeks of sales, the 50 Series shipped twice as many units as the first five weeks of the 40 Series years ago.
And players are using the cards the way they were meant to be, as 92% are turning on DLSS4 and 96% are using Reflex and 90% are using ray tracing.
Nvidia announced enhancements across its neural rendering and RTX technology suite, including that neural shaders are coming to Microsoft DirectX in April, and RTX Remix is officially releasing out of beta alongside a new playable Half-Life 2 RTX demo.
Nvidia also said RTX Kit is receiving major updates with Unreal Engine 5 support for RTX Mega Geometry and RTX Hair, and Nvidia ACE autonomous game characters are debuting in two titles.
Half-Live 2 RTX — Remastered with Nvidia RTX Remix
You can relive the critically acclaimed and award-winning Half-Life 2, reimagined with full ray tracing,remastered assets, the groundbreaking AI-accelerated performance of Nvidia DLSS 4 with Multi FrameGeneration, and the best responsiveness with Nvidia Reflex.
The Half-Life 2 RTX demo exemplifies the incredible power of the new GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards, and the capabilities of the Nvidia RTX Remix modding platform, Paul said.
Every frame of gameplay is upgraded with stunning full ray tracing, new hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures, and new enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals. Built by Orbifold Studios, a community mod team, performance is accelerated with Nvidia DLSS 4 and system latency is minimized using Nvidia Reflex.
The Half-Life 2 RTX demo features a Ravenholm chapter and a Nova Prospekt chapter–use “New Game”to choose the Ravenholm chapter. Upon completing it and returning to the menu, select “New Game”to choose the Nova Prospekt chapter.
There are more than 100 titles available that support DLSS4, including Spider-Man 2, Enlisted, Monster Hunter Wilds and FragPunk. That’s not bad for 1.5 months, as it’s the fastest ramp of a new gaming technology for Nvidia — 16 times faster than DLSS3, Paul said.
“Given this great adoption of RTX technology by our gamers, we’re obviously working really hard to get the tech into more and more games,” Paul said. “And GDC is the place where we really work on this. The focus at GDC this year is on AI-powered gaming. This includes our DLSS 4 neural shaders that allow programmable shaders to access the Tensor cores, and ACE generative AI models that lock and unlock new gaming experiences based off of DLSS.”
Seven new games are getting DLSS4 as well, including Stellar Blade, a high-rated action-adventure RPG. It was the best-selling game in North America when it launched on PlayStation last year, and it is coming to PC with DLSS 4 in June. The martial arts combat game Phantom Blade Zero is also coming to DLSS4, as is the RPG Lost Soul Aside.
Paul said the difference between performance and quality mode is about a 20% to 25% boost in FPS, while still maintaining DLSS3 quality.
Nvidia and Microsoft are announcing at GDC that neural shading support is coming to DirectX via an SDK preview in April. Nvidia released RTX Remix in beta last year, and over 30,000 modders have tried it and published over 100 mods. Hundreds more are in development. One mod that released was Painkiller, a remaster of the classic game by the same name.
Now RTX Remix is officially releasing as a tool for modders to make unforgettable characters and worlds. Now it has a featured called character replacement, which remasters characters. The RTX Remix beta runtime, available today, can get about 125 frames per second (FPS) with frame generation at 4K max.
Paul also talked about the ACE technology used to make AI avatars, game characters and companions. Inzoi, a life simulation like The Sims, is the coming from Krafton later this month. The city’s NPCs (non-player characters) are called Zois and they smart companions. ACE is powered by a half-billion parameter small language model. Inzoi releases on March 28.
“It enables players to customize their family, home, and game world to create unique stories and unique gaming experiences,” Paul said.
Another title using the tech is Battle Royale Naraka BladePoint.
