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Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cube2222 4y agoHow does something like this work? Don't most of these games have custom code for rendering and lighting? How is this able to fit into that custom code automatically? Or is the automation here very limited and you just have to reverse engineer these and find the right hookpoints, while this project just provides the code that you can hook into the games?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dev_snd 4y agoThis is the reason it only works with directx 8 or 9: they have a pretty rigid render path with a clearly separated vertex and pixel shader pipeline. For directx 8, you would for example specify light sources as part of special draw calls to the directx API, which makes it easier to translate them to a ray traced scene graph. Shader tools like reshare also use heuristics to detect which of the framebuffers contains a depth map to add effects like SSAO to older games. I imagine that rtx remix can to similar things to detect where in a shader the light coordinates are stored: after all most shaders look pretty similar when it comes to implementing a Phong shader etc.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoFor everything over it, nvidia would have to expose the byzantine monstrosity that is the drivers they wrote, that detect games and hotswap the buggy developer shadercode out for working nvidia shader code. And they could do that for older titles. It just wouldnt be neat.
- ls612 4y agoI mean there’s plenty of DX9 games from the 2000s that would look amazing with an RTX touch up so that doesn’t seem like too bad a thing
- l33tman 4y agoIt hooks into the DirectX fixed-function pipeline used back in the day (i.e. where you set up model/view/projection matrices and lightsource coordinates and surface materials and sent to OpenGL/Direct3D), so it knows what the programmer wanted to do, and from there it's "easy" to replace everything. Excerpt: "Scene manager, which uses information coming through the D3D9 fixed function API to create a representation of the original scene, track game objects frame to frame, and set up the scene to be path traced."
- royjacobs 4y agoThis is such a good way to make these old games look really spectacular. 2d graphics of the era haven't aged particularly badly but old 3d games usually look pretty janky (imo!). Being able to literally see them in a new light is wonderful.
- zokier 4y agoThere is increasing newfound appreciation for that early 3d visual look though. You can see that in new games being clearly inspired by that look, for example Dusk (with "overwhelmingly positive" rating): https://store.steampowered.com/app/519860/DUSK/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/519860/DUSK/
- rasz 4y agoChildhood trauma bonded acquired taste, like enjoying Surströmming or raw oysters. Same goes for people fondly remembering original Playstation glitchfest.
- zimmund 4y agoIt's very interesting to see this new wave of games that are now evoking the childhood (or the "retro" feeling) of a new generation, in the same way pixelated games did for us not so long ago. Much like fashion or music, the state of the art of a period consolidates into a style that becomes a design choice.
- Arrath 4y agoMaybe I spent far too much time playing Morrowind, but that place just feels homey. Low poly models and muddy textures and all.
- hbn 4y agoI also feel like cranking up the quality of scenes like this is just gonna make it more jarring when you talk to an NPC, the world freezes, and their cold, dead eyes stare into your soul as their mouth awkwardly wiggles around and corny voice acting is played at you.
- danielrpa 4y agoThere we go pay for Skyrim again...
- andrewstuart 4y agoYou too?
- MikusR 4y agoDoesn't work for Skyrim. Only old games
- flangola7 4y agoSkyrim is super old
- MikusR 4y agoNot old enough
- ohgodplsno 4y agoSpecial Edition will not work, but release Skyrim is a DX9 game, it will work.
- MikusR 4y agoSkyrim is shader based so rtx remix won't work.
- PufPufPuf 4y ago2011 was 12 years ago
- zokier 4y agoRemix seems to be targeting roughly 2000-2005 era games, so decade older than Skyrim. Even Oblivion might be too modern for it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- epolanski 4y agoRemix has been available from quite some time. Anything interesting has been released with it? Any mod. I haven't heard/seen anything.
- erk__ 4y agoThe most well known example is probably the Portal mod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZHBl5yWqJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZHBl5yWqJk
- jjbinx007 4y agoI found it to be very impressive, although eventually it caused a few performance stutters on my laptop after extended playing. What a shame it can only be used on older DX 7 and 8 games.
- christkv 4y agoI think it's DX8 and 9 not sure about 7.
- hbn 4y agoI'm pretty sure that's the only example because it's made by Nvidia themselves as a showcase for this tech because they were the only ones with access to it until today. i.e. it hasn't been available until today.
- scandinavian 4y agoIt has not been available, it was just released, hence the news being submitted here. Before this the only way to use it was to just take the dll from Portal RTX and try to throw it at old games hoping it would work.
- prettyStandard 4y agoSo we should expect some builds for Steam & Proton?
- robertkrahn01 4y agoFrom the workflow shown in the video it might even make sense to build a low-res game now with DirectX 9 and "mod it up"? The texture upscaling and material inference as well as the direct modification capabilities look amazing!
- jayd16 4y agoI don't think I'd go that far, haha. Building a good looking low res texture is probably harder than getting a nice modern one.
- rasz 4y ago>Because Remix is build on Nvidia OnlyVerse hehe Someone at Nvidia of all places uploads YT video with gameplay footage at 1080 30fps with bad frame pacing and stuttering. Cool technology. Dont know what game publishers are going to say about it, Rockstar sued for less.
- amrb 4y agoI could see Nvidia licensing the tech to game publishers but they didn't get much uptake, so open source it is.
- petermcneeley 4y agoWhat was the previous suit by rockstar. I have seen suits where people were selling mods that circumvented DRM.
- ptato 4y agoFor Morrowind it didn't just upgrade the rendering, it completely changed the aesthetic of the scene. Is that on purpose? At that point you can't call the results better, only different.
- mordae 4y agoIt ended up looking similar to Oblivion. So I'd wager a guess that it was the intended aesthetic, only limited by the older technology. The only authority here would be the original designers.
- Arrath 4y agoIt seems you'd certainly be able to go in and just tweak the lighting without doing all the AI touchups, texture upscaling, and model swaps as they did in the video. Pretty wild stuff, either way.
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is true that it changes the aesthetic a bit, and it is a change rather than a straight upgrade. But the old rendering pipeline still exists I guess, and the new one look wicked cool.
- jandrese 4y agoIt seems like the big change is that the light sources now actually emit light so the scene becomes a lot brighter. Maybe part of the process should be turning down global illumination? That might make dark corners even more dark however, and "hidden" clues that were supposed to be difficult to see may become outright invisible.
- FrostKiwi 4y agoDon't read too much into it. It's a tech demo for a tool. Modders are supposed to make those decisions.
- ralmidani 4y agoWill it run on Crysis?
- anthk 4y agoThis would work great on the first Max Payne. Now if Havok was under a libre license... (or a Max Payne engine reimplementation a la re3/openrw).
- amrb 4y agofeel more likely to rip game assets and build in a supported engine like Unreal.
- henriquecm8 4y agoI played Max Payne recently, and didn't find a way to fix the audio problems, other than that it runs great.
- anthk 4y agohttps://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne#Missing_audio https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne#Missing_audio
- v7n 4y agoMP 1 & 2 remakes are in the works by Remedy https://www.remedygames.com/games/max-payne-remake/ https://www.remedygames.com/games/max-payne-remake/
- panki27 4y agoAccording to the user guide [0], it's as simple as dragging the provided DLL into the game folder. I'm going to try this out with one of my old favorites today, I doubt it'll be quite this easy. [0] https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/wiki/runtime-user-guide https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/wiki/runtime-us...
- moron4hire 4y agoI believe the DLL alone only makes the game moddable. Thereafter, there's still a lot of work to do to swap out low resolution and poly-count assets for more detailed ones.
- capableweb 4y agoThe video seems to hint that some of the process of upgrading models can be done automatically with AI-assisted tooling.
- moron4hire 4y agoYeah, but not live at runtime. It's still a pre-process that needs to be applied per game. Maybe just dropping the DLL into the game folder will upgrade the lighting automatically, in the rare cases these older games used real-time lighting. But real-time lighting, as far as I remember, was a pretty rare technique, opting instead to bake lighting into textures during asset compilation.
- jsheard 4y agoThe graphical tool shown for swapping out assets also isn't available yet, though it's supposed to be coming "soon".
- lostmsu 4y agoThat last bit will hopefully be AI automated soon.
- amrb 4y agoThe of the widescreen fixes for the Unreal games was the addition of a dll file in the game folder.
- FloatArtifact 4y agoIt's a shame that this isn't GPU agnostic.
- taf2 4y agoIt’s opened now so perhaps another graphics company will invest the time to make that happen?
- jsheard 4y agoIt is technically GPU agnostic, the injected renderer should run on any hardware that supports Vulkan raytracing. The design of the renderer certainly plays to the strengths of Nvidia's architectures though, so performance is quite bad on AMD cards.
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoperformance is terrible on just about everything. even a 4090 doesn't get above 30 fps on rtx portal without dlss helping out at 4k. A 4090! Honestly, this seems to be nvidia's way of making everything look slightly better while requiring massively stronger hardware. It feels like this was purposely done to disadvantage amd and intel
- amelius 4y agoPerhaps a stupid question, but with all the recent advances in computer graphics, why do I still see polygons everywhere in computer games? Is it really that hard to round those corners? I think we are optimizing the wrong thing. I think I'm not alone in wanting round objects more than perfectly ray-traced but polygonal objects.
- brylie 4y agoIn short, it's about the trade-off between quality and performance. Also, not all corners need to be round. The following article provides an in-depth exploration of how polygon count affects performance. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/polycount-understanding-model-efficiency-emerson-stepp/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/polycount-understanding-model...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drakythe 4y agoShort answer? It depends, but “yes” is more generally going to be true than not. The smoother the edges the more polygons there are. The more polygons there are the more work the processor has to do to render them. In a very basic sense. Now, it is absolutely possible to round the corners without incurring heavy processing cost but then you’re probably not going to get good collision, instead you’ll get incredibly obvious clipping (when one seemingly solid object passes through another without triggering collision). So game developers have to make a choice: look good in still photos or look good in gameplay? (Clipping is a jarring experience while playing). Bonus benefit: if you do it right the lower polygon count and less fancy graphic stuff means your game runs on a wider variety of hardware (smartphones, switch, Xbox/PlayStation, PC, specialty stuff). And that’s all not even getting into the cost of paying an artist to round those corners. Do you balloon your art payroll and have dozens of artists working on a few hundred “perfect” assets or would you rather they work on thousands of assets that are styled consistently and damn the real world verisimilitude? Games are a passion for many but capitalism invokes a cost when making them.
- aceazzameen 4y agoThis is amazing! Is it also possible to add animation or effects to objects/characters that didn't previously exist? Or update existing ones?
- prettyStandard 4y agoIs Nvidia making good on its promise to Open Source it's drivers a d stuff? They may not give us everything but this must be the third or fourth announcement from Nvidia on some open source they are providing I have seen in the past year or so.
- kkielhofner 4y agoNvidia really hurt themselves with their long-standing closed source driver position. In many circles (like HN) they burned a lot of goodwill and mindshare because of their driver stance and effect it has had on Linux desktop users. It is an extremely tiny population (in terms of numbers) BUT those users (like the HN users) have an outsized impact due to the tendency for them to be in technical and decision making positions. However, Nvidia (other than the driver) has a TON of open source work. In addition to contributions all over the place in the relevant open source ecosystems/projects they have 349 repos on Github[0]. They also have a variety of different organizations on Github (for some reason) like Triton Inference Server that has another 30 repos[1]. If you start wandering through these repos these aren't small efforts either - it's clear Nvidia puts a TON of resources and investment in open source. At the risk of making this another Nvidia vs AMD thread, AMD (the open source desktop darling) by comparison has 39 repos on Github[2]. Their entire project for ML has a total of another 39 repos[3]. If it weren't for the proprietary closed-source desktop driver souring people it would be clear and obvious how much of a supporter of open source Nvidia is. [0] - https://github.com/NVIDIA https://github.com/NVIDIA [1] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server https://github.com/triton-inference-server [2] - https://github.com/amd https://github.com/amd [3] - https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute
- nazgulsenpai 4y agoNVIDIA open sourcing lots of non-graphic driver codebases doesn't excuse them from open-sourcing their graphic drivers. It's simple really.
- kkielhofner 4y agoI'm not saying it does. Your comment is exactly what I'm talking about "Nvidia has millions of lines of open source" "Yeah but their driver though - they hate open source and I hate them". It's not that simple.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sintax 4y agoLooks like it's based on DXVK from https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
- paulmd 4y agoIt's too bad this is a no-go for online/competitive games, which tbh are a decent number of the DX9 games still worth playing. I'd love to use this on Team Fortress 2 but I don't want to risk it on my account with all my items without some kind of explicit approval, since this hooking/injection probably looks just like a hack to VAC. But path-traced TF2 would own lol.
- Bjartr 4y agoAren't there non-VAC servers you could play on?
- paulmd 4y agoNon-valve? Yes. Non-VAC? Very very few that I know of. Nobody wants to deal with a horde of hackers and bots, not even community servers.
- smoldesu 4y agoIt might be fine. If it's just messing with the way DXVK is being presented, it's not very different from the "hacking" people use to get DirectX games working on Linux. AFAIK, games aren't really picky about graphics API calls as long as everything behaves as-expected.