The modding community brings incredible value to the gaming industry. There are many games that could be just “unthinkable” without some mods. DOTA was a WarCraft 3 mod, and Counter-Strike was built on classic Half-Life; some of them became even more popular standalone games, leaving their main games under their shadow. Additionally, some games are just unplayable without mods, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of WarCraft. Now, Nvidia delivers its RTX tools to the hands of the modding community and introduces it with one of the best PC games ever, Portal.
We love modders
First, let’s talk about the craft of the modding community. As I said earlier, the modders can make an entirely different game with a very different playstyle; or even they can define new genres as well. There are story, UI, audio, gameplay enhancing, graphics enhancing, and more types of mods around that could be easily downloaded and set up on a target game to improve the overall gaming experience.
Nvidia’s RTX Remix is here to help modders improve the visual side of the games easier, as expected. RTX Remix offers many tools that will greatly help the modders. If you want to know about every bit of it, you can check Nvidia’s official announcement. I will explain as simply as I can without going too deep into the details.
What is Nvidia RTX Remix?
Nvidia RTX Remix is a modding tool that is directly injected into the fixed function graphics rendering pipelines; DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 APIs. RTX Remix completely replaces the original pipeline to inject its technologies, including ray tracing, DLSS, Reflex, texture/asset replacement, and more. It also handles the emulation of x86 executables as x64 to remove the 3 GB RAM cap and converts the DirectX API to Vulkan.
RTX Remix replaces the existing lights and shadows with ray tracing techniques that alone can incredibly improve the visual quality. We have already seen it in Quake 2 RTX, but with a little extra work in the textures, which we will talk about later in this article. Ray tracing replaces the pre-configured lighting, diffusion, reflection, and shadow effects with a similar-to-real-life algorithm. It is a very heavy task even for an RTX 4090, which is the highest-performance consumer-grade GPU in the market. But, it is also beautiful.
Surfaces matter
Ray tracing calculates the surface material of the textures to deliver a realistic lighting effect. The reflections of the light are very different on a metal surface and a piece of wood. To accurately calculate it, the ray tracing technique requires surface material information from the textures of the games. However, developers of the older games have never thought about materials; so they are simply colored textures. RTX Remix helps the modders with this issue as well. Modders can easily map the textures with material information while upscaling them up to 4x, thanks to the AI Super Resolution feature. RTX Remix helps with the geometric details of the new surfaces as well.
RTX Remix also brings Nvidia’s successful upscaling technology, DLSS, which is sadly a necessity for ray-traced games. Until DLSS 3.0, this technology was lowering the actual resolution of the game to upscale the frames with the tensor cores in Nvidia GPUs. DLSS 3.0 on the other hand, has brought entire frame generation like the “motion plus” features of the TVs, but better. DLSS is available in RTX Remix to mitigate the performance impact of all of the aforementioned improvements in older games.
The first product: Portal with RTX
Now, let’s talk about the first game modded with RTX Remix. Nvidia has chosen Valve’s Portal game to show the capabilities of RTX Remix and published it on Steam as a free DLC for Portal owners. Portal was released back in 2007. If you have never played this game, you are missing a great gaming experience. Portal is a great game and Portal 2 is a masterpiece. Play it! Nvidia has chosen a great game to introduce RTX Remix.
First of all, Portal with RTX is a great-looking game or DLC. The textures, lighting effects, transparency effects, and everything look incredibly good and up-to-date. There is a huge visual quality difference between the original Portal and Portal with RTX. I will not talk about how good Portal with RTX looks, but about the overall experience.
A new menu in the game
RTX Remix brings an additional menu to the game, which is accessible with the Alt + X key combination. In this menu, you can set all of the new quality options. However, the game’s Options still include graphics options and if you touch them, your game might crash. I’d expect them to be integrated into the actual game menu. Portal with RTX also offers a very complicated developer menu of RTX Remix, which I don’t know if it is here because Nvidia wants to show the options to modders, or if it will be enabled in all RTX Remix mods.
RTX Remix’s menu offers very useful options that enable users to change the details of DLSS and ray tracing features. Light bounces, ray tracing denoising, textures, as well as the details of the upscaling technique are all available for configuring.
Still alive
The performance, however, is just bad. Ray tracing is a hard hit for GPUs, we all know that. But I have never seen a game that hits so hard that my system (Ryzen 5 3600 + RTX 2080) cries at 6 FPS without DLSS. Thankfully, we have DLSS; I have cranked it to Ultra Performance mode to reach 45 FPS on 3440 x 1440 ultrawide resolution. And as you expect, it looks terrible. I guess I will have to spend more time in the RTX Remix settings, which sometimes requires game restarts too, to reach a really playable framerate. Or just buy an RTX 4090…
One of the problems I have seen in the game is the colors of some textures. Don’t panic, they still look great. However, the colors of the wall textures are very important in Portal, especially in the later parts of the game. In Portal with RTX, the distinction between some walls’ colors became almost non-existent. And this problem makes the game harder, affecting the gameplay experience. But it might not be an issue when the actual modders take RTX Remix in their hands; Nvidia itself has developed this mod and the guys behind the decisions might have focused more on “good looking”, instead of sticking to the original.
Overall, Portal with RTX looks like a half-finished mod while showcasing the incredible potential of RTX Remix.
As a gamer, I am pretty excited to see ray-traced TES IV: Oblivion in the future. But as a Portal fan, I am disappointed after waiting more than two months to experience Portal with RTX technologies.