It just got a bit easier to make old games look nice on modern gaming PCs, because Nvidia has officially launched its RTX Remix platform out of beta and into the world.
This is significant because RTX Remix makes it much easier to mod old games in order to make them look nicer and run better on modern PCs with Nvidia GPUs.
The platform was launched in January 2024 as an open-source toolkit for modders to use Nvidia's technology to remaster old games, and today (March 13) it's getting a meaningful upgrade.
You might remember RTX Remix as the platform used to create that eye-catching remaster of Portal back in 2022, which made Valve's classic PC puzzler look almost new again with the help of upscaled textures, raytraced lighting and more running on Nvidia's DLSS 3 tech.
Since then modders have taken the RTX Remix SDK and continued working to remaster classic games like Deus Ex, Left 4 Dead 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The platform is compatible with over 150 games at this point, and there are now nearly 40 old games with fully playable RTX Remix remasters available on ModDB—with more likely to come soon now that RTX Remix is finally out of beta.
Most notably, a Half-Life 2 RTX demo made by Orbital Studios will be coming out March 18 during GDC 2025 to showcase this tech in action.
Remastering old games just got easier
Now that RTX Remix is officially live and in the wild Nvidia is upgrading it with DLSS 4 support, which means good things for both players.
If you're one of the lucky ones who managed to snag an Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series GPU this year, you can look forward to more frames per second in RTX Remixed games than ever thanks to DLSS 4-exclusive Multi-Frame Generation feature.
And even if you have an older 40-series or 30-series card, you can use DLSS 4's other features to get performance boosts in RTX Remixed games.
On the modding side, Nvidia is working to make modding and remixing old games easier by adding in new creator tools like a stage manager and a skeleton remapper. Nvidia has also added new algorithms for processes like calculating light and shadow data, and they're all designed to take advantage of the company's next generation of cards.
Outlook
I think the RTX Remix toolset is an amazing resource for fans of old games, and the fact that it's basically open-source is great to see. I'm glad Nvidia is finally taking the "beta" tag off the platform, and I'd love to see competitors like AMD take a stab at offering similar tools to the modding community.
But mostly I'm just jazzed that someone might finally have an easy time remastering a classic like Morrowind and filling our favorite old games with gorgeous path-traced lighting and volumetric shadows.
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