Beyond just upscaling and MFG, Nvidia has also touted new neural rendering techniques with its Blackwell architecture. In a presentation on neural rendering, Nvidia mentioned Neural Textures, Neural Materials, Neural Volumes, Neural Radiance Fields, and Neural Radiance Cache. It also talked about Mega Geometry in combination with these other rendering features.
Nvidia hasn’t announced any specific games that will use these features, instead opting for an Unreal Engine 5-powered demonstration called Zorah that uses the functionality. Using Neural Materials, Zorah was able to deliver higher-quality visuals than traditional materials while using about one-third as much memory. We’ve seen similar details about NTC (Neural Texture Compression).
The implication here is obvious: an 8GB RTX 50-series GPU could end up behaving like a 24GB GPU. Except, developers will need to explicitly support NTC or Neural Materials; it’s not something that Nvidia can enable in its drivers, as far as we can tell—or at least, it’s not something Nvidia can enable in its drivers without game developers and publishers opting in for support. (Nvidia doesn’t want to upset anyone by doing on-the-fly recompression of game assets.)
That’s unfortunate, as universal support for NTC on existing games would go a long way in alleviating concerns with the 8GB and even 12GB Nvidia GPUs. We’ve seen plenty of games where the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti 8GB cards fall flat on their faces at higher-quality settings and resolutions. The existence of the 4060 Ti 16GB proves where such issues are due to memory capacity rather than other aspects of a graphics card, and a growing number of games simply don’t work well with 8GB cards.
At least for the time being, Neural Rendering won’t help—not unless games get patches and maybe even ‘Neural Texture Packs’ to take advantage of the new features.