forget the GeForce RTX 4000, the real innovation of Nvidia is here


Nvidia unveiled its RTX Remix technology at the same time as the GeForce RTX 4000. A very promising tool that deserves a spotlight, in ray tracing of course.

Nvidia unveiled its new GeForce RTX 4000 graphics cards this week with a lot of noise, and they are not cheap. But, for several years, Nvidia has mobilized a lot of effort behind software projects implementing their technical innovations. We often focus on its graphics cards, but it is these software innovations that deserve our attention.

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This is the case of RTX Remix, a technology presented by Nvidia during its conference. We had the opportunity to talk to the engineers responsible for this promising idea. What if gamers could easily and for free create remasters of popular video games?

How it works ?

With RTX Remix, Nvidia offers to help you easily remaster a game by improving its textures and adding ray tracing.

RTX Remix Nvidia how-to

To do this, Remix will actually offer you to play the video game you want to remaster on your PC, to intercept calls to the graphics card (draw calls) and so “film” what she sees. For this to work, the game must run on DirectX8 or 9. We are therefore talking about games developed in the 90s or the beginning of the 2000s. This allows Nvidia to override the source code and the engine used by the game. RTX Remix will thus capture the geometry of the scene, the textures used, the light and the placement of the cameras.

In the idea, we are not so far from Google Street View which photographs the streets, or photogrammetry which converts a set of photos into 3D environments.

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With all this data, Nvidia can offer a complete scene in USD ( Universal Scene Description ), an open 3D format. From there, modding players can use their tool of choice (3DS Max, Blender, Maya, Unreal Engine) or Nvidia’s to modernize the game.

Nvidia RTX Remix 1
RTX Remix did not understand that it is a lamp: the texture is opaque

To modernize environments and allow ray tracing to work to its best, Nvidia offers an AI-powered process. Indeed, for old games, the walls and textures of a room were very simple, with just an image affixed to an elementary shape. For ray tracing, the engine needs to know the material of the surface to determine the rate of reflection of light.

Nvidia RTX Remix 2
With the right materials, the light is there

AI Super Resolution, the name given by Nvidia to this function, allows to pass the textures of a game in 4K. AI Physically Based Materials can then scan the environment and understand the nature of each material automatically.

As always with AI, Nvidia told us that there could be hiccups. A human will have to come back behind to check the work done, but the time saved will still be very significant.

We haven’t mentioned it, but modders should also be able to easily add Nvidia Reflex and DLSS support to the game.

A universal mod: what about AMD and Intel?

Once the work has been completed by the modding team, Nvidia offers to export an executable (.exe) to add to the game folder. It integrates a 64-bit Vulkan rendering engine and replaces the origin of the game. The good news is that any GPU that can handle VulkanRT should be able to benefit from these mods in principle. This includes AMD Radeon and future Intel Arc graphics cards. On the other hand, using the Nvidia RTX Remix tool to develop the mod requires an Nvidia RTX graphics card.

Ray tracing is essential for the creation of the mod and the operation of Nvidia Reflex, but it should be possible to deactivate it when playing the game. One could thus benefit from the 4K remastering without necessarily using ray tracing.

A remaster machine for studios?

With RTX Remix, Nvidia is primarily targeting the modder community. The very one that offers hundreds of mods for Skyrim, Morrowind, Half-life and many other games. This also gave birth to cult titles like Counter-Strike (a mod for Half-Life), DotA (a mod for Warcraft 3) or PUBG (a mod for Arma 3).

However, we can ask ourselves the question of the use of RTX Remix by video game creators, and the relationship of RTX Remix with the intellectual property of publishers and developers. If a game doesn’t allow mods, can a person really reuse developer textures and 3D models through Nvidia’s tool?

For the engineers of the firm, the work was done upstream to take the temperature of the partners. If a developer were to object to the use of RTX Remix, Nvidia would do its best to limit the use of its tool. To Nvidia’s credit, modders didn’t wait for RTX Remix to modify copyrighted games.

Regarding use by studios, this does not seem to be on the agenda for Nvidia, which wants to make RTX Remix a free tool and put it in the hands of players. The RTX Remix team expects some developers to be interested, however, and would like to open this dialogue. Beyond the remastering tool, it is in particular the rendering engine that could interest developers. Without touching the source code, sometimes lost by the studios when it comes to old games, Nvidia is able to modernize the execution of a game: Vulkan instead of DirectX 9, going to 64 bits and adding the ray tracing notably.

A promising technology

As long as it has not been adopted by modders, it is difficult to get a definitive idea about RTX Remix. For the moment, we are at the stage of the promise. Nvidia still unveiled Portal RTX developed with RTX Remix.

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We asked the engineers about the release of this mod to Portal scheduled for November. This project would have required the effort of about twenty developers for an indefinite time. We are therefore about the size of a great team of modders, but not an unrealistic size. The mod working team Black Mesa for Half-Life started with 13 people.

It also remains to be seen how developers will react to the possibility of seeing free remasters being made by amateurs. As with GeForce Now, which allows you to avoid repaying your games, isn’t Nvidia putting them in front of players, and in front of the deprivation of a source of income or negotiation with publishers?

The project is not open source, it is also necessary to determine what is the durability of a mod made with RTX Remix. If Nvidia ends up dropping support for this technology in several years, what will become of the various mods and therun-time(the engine built into the executable) proposed.

However, on paper, RTX Remix could change the experience of gamers in the future in a much more profound way than the simple launch of the GeForce RTX 4000s. Modding still has a bright future.


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