Nvidia RTX Remix: Portal and Morrowind shine with new splendor

With RTX Remix, Nvidia offers a new tool as part of the Omniverse program with which old games can be brought to life with “RTX” graphics thanks to AI and deep learning. Versions of the Portal and Morrowind classics modified in this way were demonstrated at the 2022 GTC.

RTX Remix as a modding tool for classics

Nvidia’s CEO described the new developer tool as a collection of AI-enabled toolsets, as well as AI and deep learning models. RTX Remix will be released shortly. The portal shown with RTX will be offered to owners of the game as free DLC in November. In Morrowind, the graphical differences are even greater; the game also predates Portal by five years. Mount & Blade is also a candidate for this form of remastering.

However, only some DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games with “fixed function graph pipelines“. When a hotkey is pressed in a compatible game, the software captures the scene that is displayed. RTX Remix Runtime captures lighting, geometry, textures, and cameras. Older games like Morrowind use the D3D9 runtime to pass draw calls to the GPU. Nvidia explains that these draw calls are intercepted by the RTX runtime and interpreted into different assets, which are then assembled as a scene. From there, the assets and scenes are converted into the Universal Scene Description (USD) open 3D framework, which forms the foundation of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for creating and running custom 3D pipelines.

The USD assets thus created can be imported into the RTX Remix application or other Omniverse applications such as Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, Blender or Unreal Engine. This should make it easier for modders to work together on game mods.

Thanks to AI Super Resolution, the often “mushy” textures of older titles are upscaled by up to four times the resolution. With the help of AI Physically Based Materials, more realistic surfaces are also created, which in the case of Mount & Blade also interact with light, which is not the case in the original. Lighting effects in games can be spiced up with ray tracing and shadows.

Of Nvidia GTC 2022 contribution to RTX Remix goes into much more (technical) details.