4 ms·

Nvidia RTX Remix: Create and Share Rtxon Mods for Classic Games

59 points by omnibrain 4y ago

dwrodri 4y ago
This looks like it'll be a gamechanger for older games who are interested in buying visual masters of games from their nostalgic years. As a Mount & Blade fan, it's seeing the game lined up against Skyrim and Morrowind is a bit of a sour reminder of how long the game has been stuck in development hell. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game and visual fidelity isn't the focus of the game, but... it's a bit telling when it's literally being compared against a game that is literally over 10 years old.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  It's been interesting watching the remaster fever over the past ten years, because I think in many ways it's been a huge reckoning in terms of which games actually have held up in terms of the core gameplay loop, and which have not at all. Ocarina of Time 3D, Wind Waker HD, Shadow of the Colossus? Absolutely these hold up, the games are still masterpieces, and the handful of QoL improvements were perfect— exactly what was needed. But PS1-era collectathon platformers like Spyro and Medi-Evil? Definitely not so much, and dressing them up in a fresh coat of paint in some ways just casts into relief how vacant these games always were.
  - VyseofArcadia 4y ago
    I missed Spyro back in the day. My friend who had a PS1 had a couple of Crash games, but no Spyro. When I picked up the remaster, I thought it held up very nicely. Controls are responsive, core mechanics are still fun. I am admittedly a fan of the genre. I also felt the Banjo games aged very nicely when I first tried them a couple of years ago.
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Nice! TBH I maybe didn't give it enough of a chance, but I booted it up and played the first few areas, and definitely my impression was "okay, yeah, but I'd really rather just be playing more Ratchet & Clank or A Hat In Time."
      - VyseofArcadia 4y ago
        You know, you're not wrong about that, especially given that RAC is made by the same folks as Spyro. I will say there are a handful of mechanics unique to Spyro that I enjoyed (flight stages in particular), but if you haven't finished the RAC games yet, I'd say they're absolutely worth playing first. I loved A Hat in Time, but I'd definitely put it in a different sub-genre (or maybe sub-sub-genre) from Spyro. I feel like there's a divide between games where you go into a level to collect a thing, then the level is over (e.g. Mario 64) and games where you go into a level to collect ALL the things (e.g. Banjo Kazooie). The former tends to have a little more variety, as often the level will change in-between things.
pawelduda 4y ago
Awesome, let's do it for Thief series.
drumttocs8 4y ago
This is exciting! Not only does it give a chance to breathe new life into old games, but it's an excellent example of how communities can create value, both for the user and for the sponsor (Nvidia in this case).
omnibrain 4y ago
While it seemingly can do wonders for the textures/assets, there is still the problem with the wooden animations of older games. I know at least one person that can't overlook them, he would be finde with less fidelity in total, but wooden animation breaks the game for him.
- prox 4y ago
  Animation is also the hardest to do, needs a lot of skill to do it right. It doesn’t help animations from Skyrim and M&B where very poor to begin with :) Even in 2012 it looked like Todd Howards nephew did it or something, or some poor intern.
- taskforcegemini 4y ago
  I don't feel like modern games are that much better. thanks to current engines anyone can make games with photorealistic graphics, but animations are still far from great. looking forward to seeing ai improve this area
  - crtasm 4y ago
    "ASE: Large-Scale Reusable Adversarial Skill Embeddings for Physically Simulated Characters" on Two Minute Papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q I wonder how long it'll be before work like this gets into a commercial game.
out_of_protocol 4y ago
If this tech is limited to 40x cards only, it's kinda useless - with previous generations cards being dumped into market from miners P.S. Europe: 4090 - 1949EUR 4080 16GB - 1469EUR 4080 12GB - 1099EUR
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Not useless at all. People who want it now can pay for it. I don't mind waiting years.
  - out_of_protocol 4y ago
    You can't expect any mods being developed if only 0.1% most wealthy can have one, basically throwing money into monitor
    - Krasnol 4y ago
      Star Citizen just made half billion dollars.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > NVIDIA RTX Remix requires a GeForce RTX GPU to create RTX Mods, while mods built using Remix should be compatible with any hardware that can run Vulkan ray-traced games It doesn't sound like it's limited at all. The last sentence implies that even non-Nvidia cards will be able to play these 'remixed' titles. If they're not joking around about the "should be compatible with any hardware that can run Vulkan" line, it should be compatible with Linux too.
  - ls612 4y ago
    I think you need an RTX 40 series card to create the mods, but can play them on any ray tracing card. Although who knows what the ray tracing performance will be like on a 2060.
    - 4y ago
zokier 4y ago
I guess nice idea, but wtf nvidia is going on with those comparison shots, the new "improved" versions are completely missing the ambience/feel of the original scenes. Instead of having dark neutral/cold gloomily lit scenes we now get scenes flooded with warm light? I suppose its neat that you can do such relighting of stuff, but it doesn't feel like it serves the games properly.
- bpye 4y ago
  Agreed. The Morrowind screenshots at least also seem to have geometry that just doesn't exist in the original game?
  - lewispollard 4y ago
    It seems to be a tool that intercepts D3D calls and translates them into a Vulkan layer, sort of like DXVK (edit: I just saw that it literally uses DXVK, which makes sense), including intercepting the actual resources being uploaded to the GPU. So probably the user of this tool can intercept mesh data being uploaded and say "replace it with this mesh" which has completely different geometry. Also nothing about this tool screams "automatic", it definitely seems to be something that serves as a modding tool rather than an "RTX ON" toggle.
darkteflon 4y ago
PSA that Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) is a driver-level upscaler that works on loads of older games and is an excellent way to keep your frames high when running at higher (panel) res or with expensive visual effects mods enabled, such as with Reshade. In my testing on Alien Isolation and Stalker, on higher settings it also produced fewer aliasing artefacts versus native 4K. Hopefully NIS will remain compatible with Rtxon-modded games. AMD has Radeon Super Resolution, which by all accounts is also great.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  NIS also works with MPV and I use it to upscale videos as I watch them, especially 1080p to 4k.

59 points by omnibrain 4y ago

This looks like it'll be a gamechanger for older games who are interested in buying visual masters of games from their nostalgic years. As a Mount & Blade fan, it's seeing the game lined up against Skyrim and Morrowind is a bit of a sour reminder of how long the game has been stuck in development hell. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game and visual fidelity isn't the focus of the game, but... it's a bit telling when it's literally being compared against a game that is literally over 10 years old.

mikepurvis 4y ago
It's been interesting watching the remaster fever over the past ten years, because I think in many ways it's been a huge reckoning in terms of which games actually have held up in terms of the core gameplay loop, and which have not at all. Ocarina of Time 3D, Wind Waker HD, Shadow of the Colossus? Absolutely these hold up, the games are still masterpieces, and the handful of QoL improvements were perfect— exactly what was needed. But PS1-era collectathon platformers like Spyro and Medi-Evil? Definitely not so much, and dressing them up in a fresh coat of paint in some ways just casts into relief how vacant these games always were.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  I missed Spyro back in the day. My friend who had a PS1 had a couple of Crash games, but no Spyro. When I picked up the remaster, I thought it held up very nicely. Controls are responsive, core mechanics are still fun. I am admittedly a fan of the genre. I also felt the Banjo games aged very nicely when I first tried them a couple of years ago.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Nice! TBH I maybe didn't give it enough of a chance, but I booted it up and played the first few areas, and definitely my impression was "okay, yeah, but I'd really rather just be playing more Ratchet & Clank or A Hat In Time."
    - VyseofArcadia 4y ago
      You know, you're not wrong about that, especially given that RAC is made by the same folks as Spyro. I will say there are a handful of mechanics unique to Spyro that I enjoyed (flight stages in particular), but if you haven't finished the RAC games yet, I'd say they're absolutely worth playing first. I loved A Hat in Time, but I'd definitely put it in a different sub-genre (or maybe sub-sub-genre) from Spyro. I feel like there's a divide between games where you go into a level to collect a thing, then the level is over (e.g. Mario 64) and games where you go into a level to collect ALL the things (e.g. Banjo Kazooie). The former tends to have a little more variety, as often the level will change in-between things.

pawelduda 4y ago

Awesome, let's do it for Thief series.

drumttocs8 4y ago

This is exciting! Not only does it give a chance to breathe new life into old games, but it's an excellent example of how communities can create value, both for the user and for the sponsor (Nvidia in this case).

omnibrain 4y ago

While it seemingly can do wonders for the textures/assets, there is still the problem with the wooden animations of older games. I know at least one person that can't overlook them, he would be finde with less fidelity in total, but wooden animation breaks the game for him.

prox 4y ago
Animation is also the hardest to do, needs a lot of skill to do it right. It doesn’t help animations from Skyrim and M&B where very poor to begin with :) Even in 2012 it looked like Todd Howards nephew did it or something, or some poor intern.
taskforcegemini 4y ago
I don't feel like modern games are that much better. thanks to current engines anyone can make games with photorealistic graphics, but animations are still far from great. looking forward to seeing ai improve this area
- crtasm 4y ago
  "ASE: Large-Scale Reusable Adversarial Skill Embeddings for Physically Simulated Characters" on Two Minute Papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q I wonder how long it'll be before work like this gets into a commercial game.

out_of_protocol 4y ago

If this tech is limited to 40x cards only, it's kinda useless - with previous generations cards being dumped into market from miners P.S. Europe: 4090 - 1949EUR 4080 16GB - 1469EUR 4080 12GB - 1099EUR

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Not useless at all. People who want it now can pay for it. I don't mind waiting years.
- out_of_protocol 4y ago
  You can't expect any mods being developed if only 0.1% most wealthy can have one, basically throwing money into monitor
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    Star Citizen just made half billion dollars.
smoldesu 4y ago
> NVIDIA RTX Remix requires a GeForce RTX GPU to create RTX Mods, while mods built using Remix should be compatible with any hardware that can run Vulkan ray-traced games It doesn't sound like it's limited at all. The last sentence implies that even non-Nvidia cards will be able to play these 'remixed' titles. If they're not joking around about the "should be compatible with any hardware that can run Vulkan" line, it should be compatible with Linux too.
- ls612 4y ago
  I think you need an RTX 40 series card to create the mods, but can play them on any ray tracing card. Although who knows what the ray tracing performance will be like on a 2060.
  - 4y ago

zokier 4y ago

I guess nice idea, but wtf nvidia is going on with those comparison shots, the new "improved" versions are completely missing the ambience/feel of the original scenes. Instead of having dark neutral/cold gloomily lit scenes we now get scenes flooded with warm light? I suppose its neat that you can do such relighting of stuff, but it doesn't feel like it serves the games properly.

bpye 4y ago
Agreed. The Morrowind screenshots at least also seem to have geometry that just doesn't exist in the original game?
- lewispollard 4y ago
  It seems to be a tool that intercepts D3D calls and translates them into a Vulkan layer, sort of like DXVK (edit: I just saw that it literally uses DXVK, which makes sense), including intercepting the actual resources being uploaded to the GPU. So probably the user of this tool can intercept mesh data being uploaded and say "replace it with this mesh" which has completely different geometry. Also nothing about this tool screams "automatic", it definitely seems to be something that serves as a modding tool rather than an "RTX ON" toggle.

darkteflon 4y ago

PSA that Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) is a driver-level upscaler that works on loads of older games and is an excellent way to keep your frames high when running at higher (panel) res or with expensive visual effects mods enabled, such as with Reshade. In my testing on Alien Isolation and Stalker, on higher settings it also produced fewer aliasing artefacts versus native 4K. Hopefully NIS will remain compatible with Rtxon-modded games. AMD has Radeon Super Resolution, which by all accounts is also great.

cercatrova 4y ago
NIS also works with MPV and I use it to upscale videos as I watch them, especially 1080p to 4k.