'Neural Rendering' could be the new AI-powered sorcery in Nvidia's next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs

pcgamer.com:

Hot on the heels of apparent confirmation of a monstrous 32 GB RTX 5090 GPU from Nvidia comes news that the world's most valuable company might be plotting a major AI-enhanced upgrade that brings in-game graphics a major step closer to fully AI-rendered graphics. In other words, games that are no longer rendered by a traditional 3D pipeline, but fully rendered by neural networks.

The technology could arrive with Blackwell, a new graphics architecture that literally everyone is expecting to debut at the CES show early in the new year. We've arguably discussed numerous variants of this new gen of GPUs ad nauseam at this point.

But a little snippet of info has possibly been leaked by graphics card maker—or add-in board partner, take your pick—INNO3D (viaHardwareLUXX). The company doesn't refer directly to new Nvidia GPUs, instead talking more tangentially about «a new range of graphics cards at CES 2025».

However, the accompanying notes makes it clear enough we're talking about Nvidia's next-gen GPUs, thanks to various references to Nvidia DLSS technology, RT cores and so on.

The notes lean heavily into AI tech and ray-tracing capabilities, including:

Now, much of that could apply to the existing RTX 40-series, but one item stands out. Yup, you guessed (you did guess it, right?), we're talking about Neural Rendering Capabilities.

Now, this isn't the first time we've seen mention of Neural Rendering in an Nvidia context. Likewise, you could argue that any rendering tech that uses Nvidia's AI capabilities is «Neural» rendering. So, that includes upscaling, Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction, the works.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

However, when Nvidia has used that specific phrase previously, it's typically been a forward-looking aspiration, a technology in development. Speaking last year about Neural Rendering, Bryan Catanzaro, an Nvidia VP of Applied Deep Learning Research explained how it was