Modding has been a huge element of PC gaming since time immemorial. Now, the world of game mods might be about to experience one of its largest ever shake-ups, with Nvidia’s RTX Remix technology set to enter open beta later this month.
RTX Remix, which offers a suite of tools to allow players to remaster just about any classic game they put their mind to, will enter a full open beta phase on January 22. At that point, anybody with a compatible GeForce RTX graphics card will be able to download the tools and try out remastering for themselves.
While it isn’t a simple ‘point and shoot’ solution, Remix aims to be a helping hand in the creation of visual overhaul mods for classic PC games from many different eras. At a basic level, RTX Remix can be used to add ‘RTX features’ like Ray Tracing to old games – but beyond that, it simplifies the process of more significant, top-to-bottom remaster-style mods.
Nvidia demonstrated this technology with the release of Portal with RTX, an astonishing visual overhaul for Valve’s first person puzzler classic that was created with beta versions of the RTX Remix tools.
Nvidia is following Portal up with Half-Life 2 RTX, a complete and astonishing-looking overhaul of a much older game developed with RTX Remix by a hand-picked number of community members who were given early access to the tools. Another tech demo from Nvidia showed a snippet of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind reimagined with Remix.
Remix will require a good amount of knowledge to use in earnest, but that doesn’t stop it from being mind-bogglingly impressive in terms of how much it streamlines the process through AI and a combination of other RTX GPU exclusive tech. Right now, it isn’t compatible with everything, and is limited to 3D games that run on certain versions of DirectX – but if the tool takes off, its compatibility is likely to expand.
Come January 22, anybody with the necessary PC hardware will be able to get involved and begin creating.
Nvidia has good reason to do all this, too: modding is a big market. When it revealed RTX Remix, the company estimated that there are in excess of 10 million people who classify themselves as ‘modders’, creating mod content – and that over 7 billion game mods were downloaded every single year. With Remix, we very well may see that number grow.
