In 2022, Nvidia unveiled its massive resource platform for the PC modding community, called Nvidia RTX Remix. Now the tech giant has launched it for an open beta, giving modders a massive toolkit with full ray tracing, Nvidia DLSS, Nvidia Reflex, modern physically-based rendering (PBR) assets and generative AI texturing tools.
Nvidia RTX Remix is built on the self-titled Nvidia Omniverse, an end-to-end DirectX 8 and 9 game remastering platform with a core feature pipeline. Modders can remaster a growing list of older PC games by using various tools on the Remix platform that can capture game assets and then enhance them with AI tools, and using ray tracing and DLSS to enhance those graphics to further improve and update.
According to Nvidia, Remix consists of two components: an application that creates lighting and adds remastered assets to a game scene, and a runtime for capturing game scenes and injecting the remastered assets back into the game during playback. Nvidia has already demonstrated the power of its platform with its Portal with RTX remaster, while the modding community created Portal: Prelude RTX And The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind remastering. Orbifold Studios is also working on the Half-life 2 RTX: an RTX Remix projecta community-led remaster.
This platform could be a double-edged sword
However, it’s fair to wonder whether adopting this powerful platform is always a good thing. For titles like Morrowind, which honestly looks terrible, the Nvidia RTX Remix toolset does a fantastic job of remastering the classic PC title. Even Half-life 2 could benefit from a visual facelift if done right to maintain the atmosphere of the original game.
And that brings me to the next problem: for titles like Portal, getting the RTX Remix treatment would be detrimental to the game. If pointed out earlier, Portal 2 already looks beautiful thanks to excellent art direction and clever design. Simply making more graphical updates without thinking about how they’re applied or whether the game even needs them is a waste of time at best and actively harmful at worst.
You could even argue that this technology could negatively impact the older titles that would benefit most from these improvements. Older games often took full advantage of graphical limitations to create iconic atmospheres and if new technology is applied without an idea of how to best reproduce the original atmosphere, you could end up with a remastered title that looks impressive but also does not resemble the original work.
I’m curious to see how well the modding community will continue to use this technology. We’ve already seen some really big efforts, like recreating Morrowind in Skyrim’s graphics engine or Fallout: London. While I set aside corporate endeavors like the Portal 2 remaster, I remain hopeful for fan-led projects created by people with a deep understanding of what makes classic games great in the first place.