Nvidia RTX 50-series and dev kit show that rasterization is old news and we're now firmly in the era of AI rendering

pcgamer.com:

Goodbye rasterization, hello neural rendering. To complement the launch of the GeForce RTX 50-series at CES 2025, Nvidia has announced an updated RTX software kit for developers, with APIs for neural rendering—shaders, materials, and texture compression, and more performance in ray traced games. The tech won't be in games just yet but at least we have a purdy video to see just what it can all do that rasterization can't.

In September 2018, Nvidia released its first graphics cards to bandy the phrase 'AI' at the PC gaming market, in the form of the GeForce RTX 20-series. The Turing-powered GPUs in these cards sported new processing units, so-called Tensor cores and RT units, for doing matrix calculations and accelerating ray tracing mathematics. However, the only AI they actually did was frame upscaling for the DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) algorithm, which appeared in February 2019.

Now, with the latest Blackwell GPUs, AI is no longer a mere sidekick: it's the most important aspect of the whole processor and to allow developers to tap into its potential more easily, Nvidia has updated its RTX software kit with a raft of new tools.

You've got neural shaders to «unlock new compression and approximation techniques for next-generation asset generation», neural texture compression for «8x VRAM improvement at similar visual fidelity to traditional block compression at runtime», and neural materials to «compress shader code of complex multi-layered materials for up to 8X faster material processing to bring real-time performance to film-quality assets.»

If that's not enough, there are APIs and tools for RTX Mega Geometry (which improves the performance of BVHs, bounding volume hierarchies, for ray traced games) and RTX Neural Faces, aka generative AI face rendering (for…err…nice looking faces?). Oh, and everything else that was already there, such as RTX Dynamic Illumination, as seen in Star Wars Outlaws, and Opacity Micro-Maps, which are used in Indiana Jones and the