If you're not up to speed yet, here's a clip from the keynote and the video above provides an in-depth look at how it works.
NVIDIA RTX Remix is a free modding platform built on NVIDIA Omniverse that vastly expands the modding capabilities of compatible DX8 and DX9 games. With Remix, modders can use a combination of AI texture tools and their own artwork to replace textures, objects and materials with high-quality versions. It also allows modders to inject modern lighting techniques like ray tracing, DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex into the game.
Perhaps the biggest and most exciting thing about RTX Remix is that it effectively enables modding for titles that were either harshly limited or almost impossible to mod beforehand!
So how does it work? Modders can start the game with RTX Remix running alongside it and at the press of a button, all the render data for textures, geometry and lighting data is captured and converted to the Universal Scene Description (USD) format which is then loaded into the application. From there, modders will be able to replace assets, update textures and tweak the lighting to their heart's content. It also features AI-assisted upscaling tools to supplement the modder's workflow. Once they're ready to share what they have created, all the changes can be bundled into an RTX mod.
For players, you simply install the RTX mod near your game executable and when you boot up, the changes made in Remix will be automatically applied. That's not all though. RTX Mods will also include an in-game configuration menu that allows the player to tweak lighting, reflectivity and other values on the fly to achieve their desired effect.
RTX Remix will require modders to be using a ray tracing capable NVIDIA GPU to create the content (RTX 20 series or above) but players can install and play RTX mods with any GPU that supports Vulkan Ray Tracing.
You can see a great example of what's possible with RTX Remix by looking upcoming Portal RTX trailer or the Morrowind RTX Mod showcased during the keynote. There's no confirmed release date yet, but we're optimistic that you'll be able to get your hands on RTX Remix sometime in early 2023.
NVIDIA is excited to see how modders will take advantage of RTX Remix and has joined us in this post to answer your questions from the comments. Before we get to that though, here's a word from Nyle.
Thanks Nexus Mods. Modders, we are working hard to make sure you don’t have to wait long to start creating with RTX Remix. When we made Quake II RTX and saw all of the amazing things the community built off of it, it was eye-opening. We knew our next project had to be more than an RTX remaster–it had to more importantly enable the community to apply their undeniable creativity to the diversity of classic content that is out there. From the games that have been difficult to mod, to community favorite titles and existing mods–RTX Remix has the possibility to reimagine all of these experiences in beautiful path tracing with high quality assets. We can’t wait to see what jaw dropping remasters and remixed mods you will create with this powerful tool. And with that, please feel free to ask whatever questions are on your mind, but please understand that I’m here to share more on RTX Remix and Portal With RTX and am not in a position to speak to other topics (GPU availability, price, performance for example). We can’t unveil everything just yet since RTX Remix is still deep in development, but we will do our best to answer all that we can.
To ask a question, simply leave a comment on this article - please take a minute to scan the existing comments so that we avoid too many repeated questions. Nyle will answer as many as he can, but please keep in mind the topics they can and can't discuss!
Don't worry about digging through the comments for answers though, I'll be adding a copy of each question and answer to the spoiler in the pinned comment below.
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Nyle Usmani
NVIDIA Product Manager
Hey Argonil,
We look forward to seeing your future experiments with RTX Remix! On to your questions:
As long as players have the RTX Mod with remastered assets, they will see the maps with updated visuals. The server is uninvolved in the rendering process and is not relevant to whether users will see updated visuals–it’s all about the RTX Mod users have locally stored on their PC. Because the RTX Remix runtime is only influencing the visuals, players should in theory be able to play against each other even if some players are seeing the vanilla game while others are using RTX Mods.
To correct a misconception, you may not have to remaster every custom map. In old games, many custom maps reuse the same textures and assets. RTX Remix should replace all of those textures and assets if the mod has replacements available, even if the level geometry is being seen for the first time.
As for dynamically downloading RTX Mods in game for players who do not have those assets already–that type of functionality would have to be modded into the original game by the modder so that remastered assets are downloaded and put into the RTX Remix Runtime's asset folder. RTX Remix wouldn’t be involved in architecting such a system.
Another thing to note–Anti-cheat software may prevent RTX Remix from working in certain competitive multiplayer titles.
Hey DarioRT64, big fan of your mods!
Very detailed questions!
For GPU based (fixed function) skinning, we actually have access to the pre-skinned mesh and the skeleton (including the collision volumes for raytracing) which gives us a great deal of flexibility to modify and reskin characters in RTX Remix.
We saw some (incorrect) speculation that we did not include NPC’s in our Morrowind RTX showcase because we weren’t able to properly mod them. But Morrowind actually passes us pre-skinned meshes and the skeleton so it was perfectly in our capabilities to modify the NPCs. In order to give the artists time to do an incredible job, we narrowed the scope of the project to an indoor environment without NPCs.
For the modder, they have two options. Recreate all three assets with different levels of detail to give you a similar feeling as the original game. Or map a high quality asset to all three instances, which would help make the asset feel more at home in a modern graphical context.
Hope that helps Dario. Can't wait to see what you can do with RTX Remix!
Hey DarianStephens,
I love technical questions like this.
For dynamically loaded objects, as long as the capture properly includes each object that is dynamically loaded in and out of an area, the replacements should also dynamically load.
As far as day/night cycles go, that’s a trickier question. Assuming the celestial bodies are coded as directional lights, the ray traced conversion should retain that feeling of dynamic day and night cycles with more realistic shadowing and skies. From our outdoor tests in Mount and Blade: Warband, we’ve seen some stunning sunsets and sky lighting with realistically rendered light rays peeking through clouds–it’s entrancing to see that kind of thing in games from the 2000s!
If it's a lit skybox it should also work. But developers in those days took a lot of shortcuts to simulate a lit sky and there might be certain approaches to doing classic lighting that we haven’t seen in our testing, and therefore haven’t yet addressed.
As you’ve noted, if culling causes objects to cease to exist in the original game, then the RTX Renderer would also cease rendering them. Portal has built in settings that let us disable a lot of the more aggressive culling, which lets us avoid most of those issues. It still culls lights very aggressively, so we had to implement persistent static lights even after the game stops drawing them. There are other workarounds of course–for example, we can simply attach new static lights to level geometry and disable the original lights to retain the original game’s feel without breaking the immersion of full ray tracing.
If other games don't allow customizing the culling settings, and the issue can't easily be addressed by traditional modding, then we may need to look into implementing a different system. For example, some kind of caching to improve object permanence. There are many paths to a solution and we will be paying attention to see if this becomes an issue for classic games.
We did not get to every one of your questions but hopefully this demystifies things quite a bit. I should point out, another poster asked about skinning and NPC's, so definitely take a glance at the summary that Nexus Mods will post to see how RTX Remix handles that.
Hey LZKiller7,
Btw, Killer7 was one of my favorite games on the Gamecube (always hoped the Smiths would make it into Super Smash Bros).
As such, in place of non-RT global illumination, volumetric lighting, and screen space reflections, RTX Remix offers highly customizable light accurate global illumination, volumetrics, and on/off screen reflections.
There are some post effects that are non-RT that allow modders to tweak the experience like bloom, tone mapping, motion blur, but the focus is to empower modders with higher fidelity lighting.
Hey Doodlezoid, interesting question.
Currently there is no such API but if there is interest for something like this, we can look to see if there’s anything we can do.
Thank you for the kind words RokHel! We can't wait to see the response when modders actually get their hands on it. On to your (very good) questions:
Great question VishVadeva50,
AI Super Resolution currently upscales up to 4x the original resolution of the asset, but the degree of upscale can be configured. Custom textures that a modder might have made manually will just be at whatever resolution they were created to be. During the RTX Mod export process, the exporter will handle the compression and mip generation for you (picking optimal settings for example). However, even the export process can be defined by the modder should they desire.
Hey jayserpa,
The goal is to have RTX Remix capable of modifying as many DirectX8 and 9 games with fixed function pipelines as possible. Compatibility will be an ongoing effort. We will target a number of titles for initial release and with each update, we will broaden that compatibility further.
For the technically minded, availability of the following APIs is a good predictor of compatibility:
The absolute minimum we currently need is View/Projection matrix to set up the camera correctly.
Hey Audemus,
Thank you for the informative question.
To make RTX Remix work, we have to be able to understand, parse, and re-create everything the original game does. This is already a huge task just with the fixed function DX8/DX9 pipeline. As games start to rely on shaders, it becomes even harder to accurately capture light data, texture info, and asset models.
Each step of customizability introduced by graphics APIs exponentially increases the amount of stuff RTX Remix has to know how to handle. And as you climb to more sophisticated APIs, it likely would require more and more specific code for a specific game to work with RTX Remix.
DirectX8 and 9 games with fixed function pipelines were a target for us because we can predict how things should be rendered. Compatibility could be improved for older versions of DirectX and possibly future versions of DirectX but it is a significantly more complex problem going forward.
In the future, we ourselves could expand compatibility or the community could work to introduce fixed function pipelines into existing classic games (like Modder Sajid here did in anticipation of RTX Remix):
https://twitter.com/Sajidur78/status/1581411284805120000?s=20&t=nvCiA9qcWRO6KSoKNrp4vQ.
Hey SknTheLisper!
Great question.
We are certainly interested in exploring OpenGL support but we have nothing to announce today. There are some technical hurdles such as DXVK-OpenGL support and OpenGL not exposing separate matrices for model and view transforms. All of it could be surmounted with time but our initial focus is DX8 and 9 titles with fixed function pipelines.
It would be really cool to see OpenGL modding with RTX Remix though!
Hey Argonil, thank you for the question. Ultimately it depends on the art team and what they target for any given mod. Portal with RTX is coming in under 14 gigabytes, but is not fully complete, which could go either way - either larger if we’ve got more content to update or smaller if we undertake more optimizations.
Hey BellCubeDev,
I'm not sure if your question regarding Reflex was a typo and meant to be about Remix? With respect to Reflex, the largely-procedural scenes in a game like Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest is unlikely to matter.
For RTX Remix, the question has a fairly complicated answer. It depends on if a mesh/texture will be procedurally generated the same way every time–if it is, it's essentially treated as a static mesh/texture from our perspective.
With the RTX Runtime (component of RTX Remix), we look at draw calls and motion vectors to see if an asset is present at runtime, and we replace it if we are able to identify it. As long as the modder captures even one scene with the generated asset/texture, we will be able to replace it. If the asset has a true dynamic mesh (like trees blowing in the wind or a never before seen asset), then RTX Remix will be unlikely to identify the object, and therefore won’t be able to replace it.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the question dsp2003:
For Remix to replace assets with accurate collision behavior, the redone assets must match the meshes of the existing objects they are replacing. This is because we are intercepting draw calls from the game, and replacing assets at runtime. In the Morrowind case, since it was a non-playable technical demo, we opted to let our artists stretch their legs, and make a visually appealing spectacle with new assets that would lack collision in the playable game.
However, I want to point out, adding “ghost” assets into an existing game–especially older games–has a lot of viable uses. In many classic games, it is common for there to be tables covered with non-interactive props, ceiling architecture, or even foliage–all things users can add to a scene without breaking immersion, since the player never has the expectation to collide with them in the first place. Classic games often feature flat textures to represent 3D models that are already non-interactive. These textures benefit from being modeled with a 3D mesh to accurately cast shadows and interact properly with a realistic lighting model.
Also, because RTX Remix does not care about the source of the draw calls, a modder could use RTX Remix alongside another tool that can build assets with collision, and then reskin those objects via RTX Remix without restrictive memory constraints and with full ray tracing and DLSS 3 enabled in the game.
Hey AiBlastafari (great name!):
The goal is to have RTX Remix capable of modifying as many DirectX8 and 9 games with fixed function pipelines as possible. This means there will be titles like Morrowind and Mount and Blade: Warband that are highly modded that will be supported, as well as titles that have been difficult to mod before. To set expectations – compatibility will be an ongoing effort. In Beta, we will target a number of titles and with each update to RTX Remix, we will broaden that compatibility furt6er.
1. This is more of an expansion of the previous question posed by dariort64, more specifically the part about LOD’s.
Would it be possible to completely subvert/ignore the base games LOD system and simply set up our own LOD hierarchy through RTX Remix?
This way the artist could go through and set their own performance target with mesh specific LOD distances catered to their custom assets.
2. This question ties into the first question a little. Would it be viable to give artists the ability to create “proxy” meshes for
the path tracer to use in reflections or to manually target a specific LOD to be used in reflections.
(or maybe just use the original games geometry for reflections)
3. Is it possible to override a mesh/s culling to prevent it from ever being culled or set custom parameters that would dictate when an
object will be culled in order to facilitate more efficient and or better reflections in the path-tracer?
This would allow artists to decide what geometry stays rendered in the scene, regardless
of what the base game intends.
4. I know that you guys will be validating games on you’re end, but will end-users be able to attempt to use RTX Remix with any DX8/9 game
they chose? I know similar questions have already been asked but I couldn’t find any definitive answers on this.
5. This question is more of a stretch but have you guys ever looked into a “virtualized geometry system” similar to UE5’s Nanite solution?
It would completely eliminate the need for LOD’s (and allow absurd triangle densities), but I am well aware that that is in no way a trivial task.
What Epic managed to achieve with Nanite is borderline voodoo magic.
so in short my question is. would it work on games that have a lower direct x but also say lower direct x and above for example DirectX 6.0 and above?
We look forward to seeing your future experiments with RTX Remix! On to your questions:
As long as players have the RTX Mod with remastered assets, they will see the maps with updated visuals. The server is uninvolved in the rendering process and is not relevant to whether users will see updated visuals–it’s all about the RTX Mod users have locally stored on their PC. Because the RTX Remix runtime is only influencing the visuals, players should in theory be able to play against each other even if some players are seeing the vanilla game while others are using RTX Mods.
To correct a misconception, you may not have to remaster every custom map. In old games, many custom maps reuse the same textures and assets. RTX Remix should replace all of those textures and assets if the mod has replacements available, even if the level geometry is being seen for the first time.
As for dynamically downloading RTX Mods in game for players who do not have those assets already–that type of functionality would have to be modded into the original game by the modder so that remastered assets are downloaded and put into the RTX Remix Runtime's asset folder. RTX Remix wouldn’t be involved in architecting such a system.
Another thing to note–Anti-cheat software may prevent RTX Remix from working in certain competitive multiplayer titles.
Will it be possible to make custom implementations of the shading of surfaces (e.g. shader programming) to be able to recreate specific materials more easily?
How will the USD replacement functionality work with skinned assets? Or will it only support static mesh replacement? Will assets that use vertex blending be exported with their matching bones and weights correctly? And what about games that use morphers for facial animations?
What kind of scripting functionality will be available to control what lighting or other scene settings get used in a game? Would this provide a way to modify the scene in real time to match certain systems of the game (like a game with a dynamic day/night system)?
Will there be any systems in place to deal with replacing assets in games that are capable of streaming and swapping different level of detail meshes?
Very detailed questions!
For GPU based (fixed function) skinning, we actually have access to the pre-skinned mesh and the skeleton (including the collision volumes for raytracing) which gives us a great deal of flexibility to modify and reskin characters in RTX Remix.
We saw some (incorrect) speculation that we did not include NPC’s in our Morrowind RTX showcase because we weren’t able to properly mod them. But Morrowind actually passes us pre-skinned meshes and the skeleton so it was perfectly in our capabilities to modify the NPCs. In order to give the artists time to do an incredible job, we narrowed the scope of the project to an indoor environment without NPCs.
For the modder, they have two options. Recreate all three assets with different levels of detail to give you a similar feeling as the original game. Or map a high quality asset to all three instances, which would help make the asset feel more at home in a modern graphical context.
Hope that helps Dario. Can't wait to see what you can do with RTX Remix!
Notably for Nexus, New Vegas and Skyrim.
What I'm really, really hoping is the case, is that it will only take some extra work to make games like that fully RTX-ready, perhaps missing out on some automated stuff that Remix would otherwise do, but I'm afraid that it will simply not work.
Additionally, I saw in the previews that they were always shown off indoors, and with no NPCs or other dynamic objects. It can obviously handle at least some dynamic stuff given Portal with RTX's cubes, pellets, turrets, and things, but with Morrowind, there were no NPCs, and the outdoors was never shown outside of a vanilla shot for comparison.
How does Remix handle games which have a dynamic day/night cycle, and which load/unload objects dynamically in a single area (Such as exploring the worldspace in Morrowind and travelling to different cells)? How is it able to differentiate between indoors/outdoors? Can you specify an object or vector as relating to the sun/moon, and have it adjust RTX parameters dynamically to match?
Another thing is how it would deal with games that use culling. Will objects behind you stop casting their shadows because the game engine is no longer rendering them? Can it catch the whole scene in one go with that regardless, or would it require multiple 'snapshots'?
I love technical questions like this.
For dynamically loaded objects, as long as the capture properly includes each object that is dynamically loaded in and out of an area, the replacements should also dynamically load.
As far as day/night cycles go, that’s a trickier question. Assuming the celestial bodies are coded as directional lights, the ray traced conversion should retain that feeling of dynamic day and night cycles with more realistic shadowing and skies. From our outdoor tests in Mount and Blade: Warband, we’ve seen some stunning sunsets and sky lighting with realistically rendered light rays peeking through clouds–it’s entrancing to see that kind of thing in games from the 2000s!
If it's a lit skybox it should also work. But developers in those days took a lot of shortcuts to simulate a lit sky and there might be certain approaches to doing classic lighting that we haven’t seen in our testing, and therefore haven’t yet addressed.
As you’ve noted, if culling causes objects to cease to exist in the original game, then the RTX Renderer would also cease rendering them. Portal has built in settings that let us disable a lot of the more aggressive culling, which lets us avoid most of those issues. It still culls lights very aggressively, so we had to implement persistent static lights even after the game stops drawing them. There are other workarounds of course–for example, we can simply attach new static lights to level geometry and disable the original lights to retain the original game’s feel without breaking the immersion of full ray tracing.
If other games don't allow customizing the culling settings, and the issue can't easily be addressed by traditional modding, then we may need to look into implementing a different system. For example, some kind of caching to improve object permanence. There are many paths to a solution and we will be paying attention to see if this becomes an issue for classic games.
We did not get to every one of your questions but hopefully this demystifies things quite a bit. I should point out, another poster asked about skinning and NPC's, so definitely take a glance at the summary that Nexus Mods will post to see how RTX Remix handles that.
Btw, Killer7 was one of my favorite games on the Gamecube (always hoped the Smiths would make it into Super Smash Bros).
As such, in place of non-RT global illumination, volumetric lighting, and screen space reflections, RTX Remix offers highly customizable light accurate global illumination, volumetrics, and on/off screen reflections.
There are some post effects that are non-RT that allow modders to tweak the experience like bloom, tone mapping, motion blur, but the focus is to empower modders with higher fidelity lighting.
How are skinned/animated objects tracked? Are they replaceable?
Currently there is no such API but if there is interest for something like this, we can look to see if there’s anything we can do.