RTX Remix was announced yesterday at NVIDIA’s keynote speech as part of their Omniverse reveal. Focusing on expanding modding capabilities for compatible titles running on DX8 and DX9 (of which there are many), it also gives modders the opportunity to introduce ray-tracing into just about any compatible title. Read on for our Q&A with NVIDIA about the possibilities of the tool!
Kicking off our talk was a presentation going deeper into the possibilities of RTX Remix and a breakdown of how results in both Morrowind and Portal were achieved. Much of this info can be found in our previous article, as well as the breakdown of Portal RTX here. We got the opportunity to answer some more specific queries, however, with Nyle Usmani and Alex Dunn, who led the charge on RTX Remix and Portal RTX!
Portal RTX was designed as a showcase of what a modern mod team might do with a classic game, solely
using RTX Remix and publicly available tools like Blender and Substance Painter to achieve results
Q: From what we gather you need a 20, 30, or 40 series card to run the tech - what would happen if someone without compatible hardware tried to run a mod? Is there a warning in place to say you don’t have compatible hardware?
A: To clarify, it’s not only NVIDIA RT cards that can run mods created by Remix - any graphics card compatible with the Vulkan API can take part. If a user were to try to play on an unsupported GPU, they would be notified, and the game would drop back to the regular game’s renderer. Between the runtime and playing the game, and between requirements, we imagine there might be a marketing solution here including sites RTX mods are hosted on to either section them off or label them as requiring a certain level of specifications with additional goodies to enjoy.
Q: What’s the compatibility with Remix with other mods in terms of adding other mods into the game particularly after Remix has been run?
A: We didn’t want to screw up existing mods out there so to that end, for Portal, we actually stack mods - using mods we created as Portal mods, as well as the RTX Remix content on top. It’s hard to say if it’ll work with every mod, but mesh and texture mods should work without issue. If you’ve done previous work in Remix, another mod on top that conflicts will cause that work to no longer apply. As a result you may want to then re-Remix the added mod.
One of the most impressive features of Remix's RTX capabilities is reflections from
off-screen, something not possible with screenspace-based programs like ReShade
Q: Have you given consideration to the SDKs provided by games developers and allowing Omniverse to interact with/be compatible with base game tools?
A: Assuming they’re shipped with the game and use the same renderer/baseline as the original game, Remix may be able to interact with them as well. It would be an interesting avenue to explore, providing closer compatibility between Remix and the SDKs launching with games, but we’d need to conduct further testing first.
Q: The content being exported in the examples included a lot of assets - are we expecting these mods to be physically quite large?
A: Portal RTX is around 20 gigabytes, not fully complete, which could go either way - either larger if we’ve got more content to update or smaller if we undertake more optimisation. Ultimately it depends on the art team and what they target - as we were able to put Portal RTX on Steam as an official download, we didn’t have to worry about size constraints, so we can build a 20 gigabyte remaster. Some modders may choose to do the same, but we also expect some modders could instead target a lower limit within RTX Remix so the mods are accessible to more users. There are controls in the mod system so that if a mod creator ships a number of excessive resolution textures (e.g. 8k), then those textures would only be rendered if a user had the resolution to support it; otherwise, lower resolution textures would be utilised according to what the player can support.
Morrowind's demo was smaller in scope but aimed to demonstrate
the range of difference that can be brought into just one room
Q: File names generated with RTX Remix appear to just be a hash of some sort - is there scope to give content a more user-friendly name?
A: Once some content is in the tool you can rename it yourself to make it easier to identify and more user friendly. There’s a lot that could be done - maybe even using AI to identify props and name them appropriately. The UI of the tool as seen so far is still an internal build and will be changed prior to release for more user friendly response. There’s also room for cataloguing with assets created - theoretically you could identify the most commonly used assets and prioritise them in modding order, but this functionality doesn’t currently exist in the tool. USD is the base format used to describe Remix’s mods - it’s based around a layered composition, as you saw, the hash names - so if you wanted to stack multiple USD layers, you could set the hierarchy of each USD to prioritise one set of assets over another.
Q: Are there plans to support pre-DX8 and post-DX9 games in the future (Unreal 1 games, for example, tend to be pre-DX8)?
A: We have looked into DX7 and thought about adding it to the roadmap as far as expanding compatibility is concerned. Unreal Engine 1 and DX7 is definitely something interesting and possible with the current architecture; theoretically it’s a great fit, we just haven’t done the work yet to experiment with Remix. It’s too early to say for sure post-DX9 as it gets much more complicated, but it’s a natural direction for us to take the tool. We have experiments in both directions and we’ll see how that pans out to decide the path forwards.
Morrowind is one of those games already subject to lots of graphical enhancement
mods, but Remix will allow modders to take it to the next level
That about wraps up our interview with NVIDIA. Do you have any more questions about Remix, or thoughts on the answers above? Discuss below, and don’t forget to check out our initial breakdown of Remix!
One of the most important questions, performance and how older games will handle the newer effects without dropping low frames or running into memory crashes, nobody asked in the interview. These are old 32-bit games with RAM limits (unless they have the source code and somehow made the game recognize the GPU more, vanilla Morrowind doesn't utilize much of modern GPUs or even CPUs and a lot of older, non updated games are similar). Literally the first thing on my mind.
RTX Remix replaces the 32-bit runtime of compatible games with its own 64-bit iteration - we didn't ask about this as this process is detailed on the official NVIDIA breakdown that released yesterday here: Nvidia.com
Thanks for the reply, however, its still not clear how they accomplish this especially when they would need to get the source code for the game some how and some games have their framelimit tied to animations, sounds like a lot to accomplish and perhaps pricey. Even the article acknowledges that "Incalculable amounts of time without source code PCGamingWiki" when mentioning converting a game to 64-bit. Its also worth knowing some of these moddable games like Morrowind use something like MCP to make important patches to the game or other patches for games to help with scripting. With the suppose change to 64-bit, these 32-bit dlls may no longer function anymore.
"Even the article acknowledges that "Incalculable amounts of time without source code PCGamingWiki" when mentioning converting a game to 64-bit."
That paragraph and everything before it is acknowledging the difficulties that come with doing things the traditional way, without using RTX Remix. If you read two paragraphs further you'll see the article state:
"Enter NVIDIA RTX Remix, a free modding platform built on NVIDIA Omniverse that enables modders to QUICKLY create and share #RTXON mods for classic games, each with enhanced materials, full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3, and NVIDIA Reflex."
Reading further ahead, it says it will only, at least at launch, support a subset of DX8 and DX9 games with fixed function graphics pipelines. Nvidia isn't saying that RTX Remix can be used for every game out there. They seem to be saying that for some older games, members of the community who are adept at using this toolset will be able to overhaul the visuals of certain games, in a relatively short amount of time, in a way that might have previously required countless hours and private/protected resources/tools.
But idk, I'm tech illiterate. However, modding communities seem excited, so that seems promising?
Quoting directly from the article here:
"The NVIDIA RTX Remix Runtime does the rest, replacing the old rendering APIs and systems with RTX Remix Runtime’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer, and upgrading the visuals on the fly."
So as the article describes, RTX Remix intercepts and then modifies the renderer of any compatible game to instead work with RTX Remix's 64-bit runtime.
Thanks and also thanks to @1kon for explaining a bit more. With it being up to members of the community, it may be easier to make patches for 32-bit modifications, if the source for those mods are available that is.
do anyone know if fallout new vegas work with this ?
also how do you find out what games use a fixed function graphics pipelines?
The thing is, even if New Vegas did get this NVSE would need to be reworked and so would all other .dll mods that use NVSE scripts to function since those are 32-bit .dll files.
You can find a list of all DX8/9 games on PCGaming Wiki, but right now it's unclear how many of those are compatible. NVIDIA might well release their own list of compatible games, but if not, as with all modding, some trial and error may be required!