Nvidia took a bit of time away from announcing new video cards today to talk about the upcoming beta release of their RTX Remix tool. RTX Remix will allow mod makers to "remix a compatible, classic game" with fancy ray tracing and other Nvidia technologies. Though the public beta won't be out until January 22nd for RTX Remix, some modders were granted special early access to the tool.
One of those mod groups is the team working on Half-Life 2 RTX: AN RTX Remix Project. It isn't exactly a name that rolls right off the tongue, but it does paint a clear picture here on what this project is all about. Like Nvidia's own Portal with RTX and the mod-made Portal: Prelude RTX, Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project will add full ray tracing, Nvidia DLSS, Nvidia Reflex, physically-based rendering (PBR) assets, and AI-assisted graphical improvements.
Nvidia says that RTX Remix will allow modders to essentially remaster DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games with fixed function pipelines. Some of the games they mention in their announcement include titles such as Call of Duty 2, Vampire: The Masquerade, Garry's Mod, Freedom Fighters, Need for Speed Underground 2, and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. RTX Remix allows mod makers to add in ray tracing to these old titles, upscale and create new physically accurate materials that include normal and roughness maps, add proper PBR materials to textures, and more.
Nvidia is also working with ModDB to add in a special RTX Remix section to the site. This will allow users to easily discover and download mods of their favorite classic titles. This partnership will include a compatibility list to track which games work best with RTX Remix, configuration files for compatible games, a 50GB upload size for RTX mods, and tag sorting.
Half-Life 2 RTX was first announced about four months ago now. Since then, the mod team at Orbifold Studios has grown to about 65 individuals. Today at CES, Nvidia showed off the team's first look at the iconic Ravenholm location. I've included that new trailer below along with the initial announcement trailer from August.
