Every year at CES, Nvidia comes out swinging with a slew of announcements. The biggest ones typically pertain to the GeForce graphics cards.
Aside from the unveiling of the RTX 40 Super series, this year's Nvidia keynote also saw a slew of announcements, including a beta release date for RTX Remix, the sick modding tool used to remaster classics like Half-Life 2, in addition to news for GeForce Now and a cool game development tool called ACE.
IGN had a chat with Jacob Freeman, Nvidia's GeForce Evangelist, where he talked about several of the CES announcements. Including why the RTX 30 series did not receive any Super GPU variants and confirmation that RTX Remix's beta release will have enough features to allow someone to remaster a classic game from stem to stern fully.
Read our full interview with Freeman below. Check out our Everything Announced roundup for more information on Nvidia's CES 2024 announcements.
Over two years after the RTX 40 series launch, what kind of lessons has NVIDIA learned to improve the performance of the SUPER GPUs compared to the non-SUPER counterparts?
Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist: Right. So for the Super, we look at it like a... We call it a kicker SKU. And so for that one, similar to the previous Super series we had on the RTX 20 series, we basically bumped up the performance. So 4080 gets a performance boost.
The 4070 Ti is moving from 12 gigs to 16 gig memory, with a performance boost, and the 4070 SUPER will also get a performance boost. So, in addition to that, these cards all have the same features that the 40 series have, like frame generation DLSS, supporting DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction. So it's a pretty good option for gamers at 1440p, 4K resolution, or 1080p.
Whatever resolution you have, these are great options for gamers who want to play the latest games at high framerates.
Was there a reason why Nvidia decided not to make a Super series for the RTX 30 GPUs?
JF: Yeah, I don't really have an answer on that one. I mean, it's going to come down to each individual product, if there's room to make improvements on products. We're always trying to make improvements to our products. Here, we had an opportunity to make the product faster, so now we have the Super series.
The RTX 30 series was just that good?
JF: Yeah, it was pretty good.
I want to talk quickly about the Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE as you guys are calling it. Now, Ubisoft and Tencent are some of the first developers and publishers to take advantage of this technology. Can you share anything in terms of how these developers are going to use it? Can we expect this in a game that might be coming out this year from one of these developers?
JF: Yeah. Well, I don't have any announcements on games or release dates or anything. It would be best to talk to the developers, publishers, or whoever's using the technology.
The ACE demo is a really good example of how you can use the technology. Of course, you can use this technology in many ways, but that's just one example. Using it to create more immersive interactions with NPCs. Even if you want to implement it in a way where you don't want to talk to the NPCs, you can use it to create dialogue so that you can interact with the NPCs. It can create questions for the player and the responses.
So there are a lot of cool ways to use technology, and it's very exciting.
Going back to Ubisoft. Historically, they had a very long and in-depth relationship with AMD in terms of having their games optimized to use AMD hardware. With this somewhat partnership and collaboration you guys are doing right now, can we expect, hopefully, in the future, that Ubisoft will work more closely with NVIDIA to optimize games for NVIDIA GPUs?
JF: Well, we have a good relationship with a lot of game developers, not just Ubisoft, and so we're always looking for ways to collaborate closer with our game developers and publishers. We hope to get Nvidia tech into as many games as possible because we think that the tech benefits all gamers.
That NVIDIA ACE demo was cool. I am curious to know if there are any plans in the future where NVIDIA may release this publicly so people can try out the ACE demo themselves and see what kind of conversations they can get out of those NPCs.
JF: Yeah, I don't have anything to announce just yet. That definitely would be cool at some point to release it, but don't have anything at the moment to announce on that.
Now, RTX Remix is releasing later this month in beta. It's not a full release, so there will be a few missing features. What kind of limitations can we anticipate?
JF: Right. Yeah, I have nothing yet to announce on the specific limitations. But it is considered a beta, so most people are familiar with how beta's work in general. We're going to use that to collect feedback and make it better.
Could I remaster a whole game like one of those classic games like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? Can I do that from the beta?
JF: Yes. Obviously, this is designed for modders, right? So if you had modding knowledge and you were able to mod games, you could definitely use RTX Remix to remaster classic games, just like we did with Half-Life with Orbifold Studios who is using RTX Remix to remaster Half-Life 2. So yeah, absolutely.
There's no doubt that RTX Remix is one of the more exciting tools in the modern community to come out in the last several years. When can fans expect a full release of this software?
JF: Yeah, I don't have any announcements on the actual release date, yet. But of course, with the open beta coming up, we hope to collect as much feedback as possible and make improvements to the software, and hopefully, we can release it soon.
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
