Nvidia GTC live: Jen-Hsun lays out 'the future of real-time rendering' in today's keynote and potentially 'it's gonna blow your mind'

Okay, that's some bombastic headlining right there, but when one of the people behind the success of Nvidia's DLSS feature reckons a new AI innovation in gaming is "gonna blow your mind" I'm prepared to listen. The Nvidia GPU Technology Conference starts today, with Jen-Hsun Huang hitting the stage at 11am PDT (6pm GMT) for the opening keynote, and the company's GeForce social channels have been promising that we'll get a look at "the future of real-time rendering" during the presentation.

Given that's coming via its GeForce gaming channels it's not unreasonable to think it's specifically referencing real-time rendering in PC games. Which is not something we'd normally expect to be coming out of GTC, which is traditionally very focused around general purpose GPU (GPGPU) use, and obviously most recently around AI.

But combine those tweets with something Bryan Catanzaro, VP of Applied Deep Learning Research—and someone who's worked on DLSS for the past ten years—said at GDC last week, and you can colour me excited to hear what's going on.

During a GDC panel discussion titled: AI Trends of Today and Opportunities for Tomorrow: Ask Me Anything the question was asked, "What has surprised you in terms of innovation with AI in games in the past one to three months?"

Having spoken a little about DLSS and Frame Generation in response, he goes on to talk about generative AI rendering being the "most important update to the way that graphics are rendered in at least the last decade."

"Yeah, but to your question of, what have you seen in the past month?" He continues. "I can't tell you exactly what I've seen, but you'll find out very soon, and it's going to blow your mind."

So, er... join me as we have our minds collectively blown, I guess.

Live blog

So, what could it be about? An update and some demo-ing of neural rendering in action in an actual game would be my first guess.

Introduced at CES 2025, alongside the RTX Blackwell series of GPUs, neural rendering—and neural shaders—promise big things. From enhanced AI compression techniques to deliver "next-generation asset generation" as a potental VRAM crutch (useful at a time when memory be expensive) to RTX MEGA GEOMETRY which is going to give Witcher 4 lots of pretty trees, sticking AI into the graphics pipeline has the potential to hugely up the fidelity of PC games.

Our Nick had some good ideas about this earlier:

"How about DLSS Ray Full Construction, an AI system that doesn't just denoise a ray-traced scene but actually uses machine learning to generate thousands of additional 'fake' rays?"

It would certainly make ray/path tracing a little lighter on GPUs if they only have to actually trace a couple real rays in the scene, rather than a couple per pixel.

Given how painfully expensive memory is for everything these days, however, I kinda think Nick ought to get on and patent RTX Ultra Memory.

"I've got it! Huang will hop onto the stage with a new GeForce RTX graphics card. It'll have 10,000 CUDA cores and 4 GB of VRAM, but it will be the first to use RTX Ultra Memory, an AI-powered system that neurally compresses everything automatically and does it so quickly and so well that it effectively quadruples the VRAM and its bandwidth on your graphics card. Yours for just $1,299."

This waiting music getting you all hyped, too?

Anyone else hoping to see some more Witcher 4 in action?

Here we go.

"This conference is going to cover every single layer of the five layer cake of artificial intelligence."

He does so love that phrase.

"This chart basically describes 100% of Nvidia's strategies."

But the installed base is the hardest thing to nail. It's done pretty damned well getting that install base up and that flywheel really is spinning faster.

"GeForce is Nvidia's greatest marketing campaign."

"This is the house that GeForce made... 25 years ago we made the programmable shader."

This is going somewhere... "GeForce brought CUDA to the world."

Talking about how GPUs could be used by engineers and researchers to create new ideas and models.

"AI is going to go back and revolutionise how graphics are made."

Aha, DLSS 5. Golly.

This is fascinating as it's going into games that may not have traditionally had DLSS built into it.

To be honest, 'DLSS 5' kinda feels a bit like a filter overlay than actually really DLSS 5.