RTX Remix ‘is the great equaliser’ bringing veteran and hobbyist devs together to remaster the most beloved and best PC games

By Jacob Ridley published 3 days ago

RTX Remix enables modders to breathe new life into beloved videogames. The platform, created by Nvidia, replaces the very core of classic games to take advantage of advanced modern features, such as path-traced lighting, enhanced assets, and upscaling.

What is RTX Remix?

RTX Remix is a collection of software that allows games mainly built on DirectX 8/9 to support modern lighting methods and assets. To do that, it replaces entire chunks of a classic game to form a new rendering pipeline almost entirely removed from the one that shipped with the original game.

The main thing that Remix does is that it introduces a brand new rendering engine… says Traggey, a developer and modder working on multiple RTX Remix projects. It allows us to mod the game in a way that pushes it to a quality level where it’s actually comparable to modern triple-A releases.

RTX Remix is made up of two main parts:

• Runtime—Includes the Bridge, which handles the conversion of the old runtime, and the Renderer, which offers access to a Physically Based Rendering (PBR) pipeline including an open-source path tracer. It can also ‘capture’ game assets in Universal Scene Description (USD) format.
• Creator Toolkit—The RTX Remix application for manipulating and replacing USD assets.

Though born out of Nvidia’s internal projects, such as Quake 2 RTX and Portal RTX, the platform is now available to anyone in beta and is already being used far and wide. It’s most famously attracted some of the biggest Half-Life 2 modders to take on a massively ambitious project: a complete remaster of one of the best PC games ever made.

Reimagining Half-Life 2 with RTX Remix

It is a very, very big project. I might even venture as far as to say probabl