Nvidia has launched its RTX Remix platform and made it open source. This should provide modders with more capabilities and tools to create remasters of old games and add path tracing to them.
What happened?
- On April 12, Nvidia announced that the RTX Remix runtime source code is now available on GitHub under the MIT license.
- The platform’s runtime includes Universal Scene Description (USD) capture and replacement modules, as well as the scene manager (for tracking game objects and preparing the scene for path tracing), a bridge for translating the renderer from a x86 to a x64 instruction set, and the core path tracer with different rendering features.
- According to Nvidia, working with the open source code will allow modders to render volumetric smoke, replace animated character meshes, as well as add animated lights, custom post effects shaders, and VR support.
- “Our main goal is to expand game compatibility and extend the features of Remix in collaboration with the community,” the company noted. “In keeping with that aim, NVIDIA will accept pull requests on Github for code submissions from the community, provide feedback, and help advance code until it is mature enough to be merged into the official RTX Remix runtime.”
- In addition to the RTX Remix runtime, Nvidia will soon launch the RTX Remix creator toolkit in Early Access. Used for the Portal RTX remaster, it allows modders to assign new assets within a remastered scene and use AI tools to change the look of any asset.
What is RTX Remix?
- Announced in September 2022, RTX Remix is a platform that helps creators make more advanced graphics mods for DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games.
- With its custom runtime, RTX Remix intercepts the D3D9 draw calls, which are sent to the GPU, and reassembles those assets into identical scenes. The platform is able to convert them into the USD framework used for building and operating custom 3D pipelines.
- All these tools should help modders create RTX remasters of old games and make the entire process easier and more unified.
- On top of that, RTX Remix supports the AI Super Resoultion tool that can turn 1080p textures into 4K assets.
- Nvidia has already showcased the power of its new platform with Portal with RTX, which makes even the most top-end graphics cards suffer, but adds full ray tracing to the classic game.