Nvidia RTX Technology Now Working In Some Classic PC Games

Valve’s traditional Portal was lately re-released on Steam with some very fancy new visuals, together with ray-tracing and DLSS help. That was nice information for Portal followers, nevertheless it’s additionally nice information for followers of every kind of previous PC video games.

Before we go any additional, I’ll clarify the tech we’re speaking about. RTX is the identify given to a set of applied sciences utilized by graphics card firm Nvidia that makes use of “ray tracing and AI technologies” to, very merely, make PC video games look unbelievable. Here’s a trailer for Portal With RTX, the re-release of the sport made with this tech, exhibiting the enhancements made to a sport that the majority of us keep in mind wanting very 2007:

Now, the factor with RTX is that whereas on this case (and with Quake and Minecraft) it needed to be put into the sport by builders, Nvidia are additionally releasing a model of the tech with modders in thoughts. It’s known as RTX Remix:

With RTX Remix, the sport runs within the background and we substitute the previous rendering APIs and techniques with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This permits the addition of ray-tracing to traditional video games and all of it updates in real-time as lights and objects transfer. Light might be forged from behind the participant, or from one other room, and in Portal with RTX, gentle even travels by way of portals. Glass refracts gentle, surfaces mirror element based mostly on their glossiness, reflections might be forged into the scene from behind the participant, objects can self-reflect, and oblique gentle from off-screen illuminates and impacts what you see.

Compared to Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTX, the path-traced ray tracing launched by RTX Remix is much more superior, bouncing gentle 4 instances as an alternative of as soon as, bettering high quality, immersion, and the simulation of real-world gentle. Additionally, we’ve additionally launched a number of new ray tracing strategies that additional enhance high quality whereas additionally being extra performant.

Nvidia says that RTX Remix is “a modding platform” that can enable “modders of all ability levels to bring ray tracing and NVIDIA technologies to classic games”. Given it’s not out till 2023 I used to be anticipating we had been nonetheless months away from seeing what advantages it may deliver to older video games, however nope!

Modders like LordVulcan have discovered you may add RTX juice to some traditional titles, proper now, and normally it’s achieved simply by…dropping some recordsdata from one folder to a different in your arduous drive and enabling some developer stuff within the console. That’s it. And it’s engaged on video games like SWAT 4 and the unique Max Payne.

While the outcomes aren’t excellent, no less than in comparison with the skilled jobs achieved over months on video games like Minecraft, they nonetheless look incredible! Here’s Max Payne, for instance, courtesy of Alex Coulter:

That lighting. Those shadows. This is magic.

Here’s some footage of SWAT 4 taken by EiermannTelevision, which was launched in 2005 and most undoubtedly didn’t seem like this on the time:

And right here’s Half-Life 1, together with a little bit explainer on the way it was achieved:

None of these examples are excellent, nevertheless it’s unbelievable they work this nicely given how fast their implementation was. This goes to be so good when the precise RTX Remix is launched in 2023, however till then it’s going to be cool seeing what different traditional titles this slapdash workaround is suitable with!