Like other leading Unreal Engine 5 games, Gears of War: E-Day makes extensive use of Nanite, a virtualized geometry system that enables seamless, automatic level of detail scaling for game elements, allowing developers to create cities filled with unique geometry, environments with unique terrain and mountains, and forests full of thick foliage and thousands of trees.
However, when used in conjunction with Unreal Engine 5’s ray tracing, Nanite game elements switch to a single, static low-detail mesh for ray tracing, since it’s prohibitively expensive to build acceleration structures and ray trace Nanite game elements with existing DXR 1.2 and Vulkan APIs. For the player, the game element will appear to be rendering at full detail, but the ray-traced shadow or reflection will use the low detail mesh, causing visual discontinuities and artifacts.
After 6 years of research and development, NVIDIA’s engineers have solved this problem and delivered the solutions as part of NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry. These debut today in Gears of War: E-Day, and will be adopted by Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing 2.0 standard (DXR 2.0), codifying this advancement for the entire game industry, and making ray-traced Nanite possible in all Unreal Engine 5 games.
The example below shows a visualization of the ray tracing scene in the “Market” Multiplayer map. With RTX Mega Geometry enabled, more objects are ray-traced and each object has substantially more geometry. Notice how the fish, lobsters, freezer bins, weight scale, and even floor mats are all highly detailed now. Additionally, difficult objects like the ropes on the back wall are now complete and properly represented in ray tracing.