Nvidia has released version 2.0.0 of its RTX Mega Geometry software development kit on GitHub, an update that targets ray-traced geometry too large to fit in video memory. The kit organizes detailed meshes into clusters, letting ray-traced scenes adapt geometric detail efficiently, according to Nvidia. Version 0.9.0 beta arrived in 2025 and was used in Alan Wake 2's title update 1.2.8 early that year.
Tom's Hardware testing on an RTX 4090 found about 1GB of VRAM saved along with a 13% performance gain, at native 4K and DLSS Quality. On an 8GB graphics card, that gigabyte equals an eighth of the card's memory. The company's changelog states that with version 2.0 a scene's source geometry no longer has to fit in VRAM, with detail bounded by a memory budget rather than by mesh count. When a scene exceeds its budget, it settles at lower detail instead of continually swapping geometry in and out of VRAM.
Default allocations are 2GB of VRAM for streamed geometry, another 2GB for ray-tracing acceleration structures, and 4GB for material textures, all adjustable. The existing tessellation path remains. In Nvidia's Zorah sample, 1.6 billion unique triangles arrive in a 70GB download, with an initial load that can require up to 64GB of RAM at peak. Zorah uses 31GB of mesh data, but the courtyard sample view holds only 1.5GB of mesh data in VRAM, running on an RTX 5090 at 4K with DLSS Quality.
Running the sample requires an RTX GPU with 10GB of VRAM or more, Game Ready driver 570 or later, Microsoft's DXR 1.1 or later, and Windows 10 at minimum. The release currently appears aimed at developers rather than players: it is an SDK with a reference sample, and no game has been confirmed to use it.
The rest of RTX Kit 2026.3 includes RTX Character Rendering 1.4, RTX Dynamic Illumination 3.1, RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) 0.10 beta, RTX Neural Shading 1.4, and RTX Texture Filtering 1.3. NTC has been at v0.10.0 beta on GitHub since Aug. 4, with its DX12 LinAlg path designated for testing only. That path requires preview driver 620.12, the preview Agility SDK, and Windows Developer Mode, leaving Vulkan as the only route for released games to use NTC with Tensor Core acceleration today.
Nvidia said in August that an existing problem under ray tracing is that Nanite elements switch to a single, static low-detail mesh, because building acceleration structures for them with existing DXR 1.2 and Vulkan APIs is prohibitively expensive. The company said six years of research and development produced the new technology, with the innovations debuting in Gears of War: E-Day on Oct. 6 and later becoming part of Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing 2.0 standard.
In a Sept. 22 Game Ready driver post, Nvidia said Mega Geometry enables accurate ray tracing of Nanite geometry for the first time. Game Ready driver 617.14 for the game is already available, and early access on Oct. 1 is the first chance for players to see the technology in action.
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