At Nvidia’s September occasion, the place it introduced the brand new RTX 4080 and 4090 graphics playing cards, it additionally confirmed off an upcoming mod for the original Portal on PC that injects beautiful, ray-traced visuals into the sport. It’ll be obtainable for free to all present house owners of the sport on Steam someday in November.
Whether you’ve performed the sport quite a few occasions (raises hand) otherwise you’re about to get it for the primary time (I envy you), it’ll look even higher in case you have a Nvidia RTX-series graphics card in your laptop computer or desktop. This launch follows Nvidia’s previous visible remedies that spruced up basic video games, together with Quake II and Minecraft. Check out Nvidia’s weblog post for the complete particulars.
Nvidia additionally introduced a modding software called RTX Remix, which lets artists and builders remaster older video games with AI and the latest Nvidia graphics applied sciences. The firm confirmed a demo of RTX Remix used to complement the graphics of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It’s simply an instance of considered one of many older video games that may additionally reap the benefits of DLSS 3, the latest model of its AI-assisted graphics upscaling tech, and Reflex, which minimizes enter latency. Nvidia payments RTX Remix as the answer for remastering video games that have been constructed in DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 which have fastened perform graphics pipelines.
It shortly will get fairly deep in phrases of technical particulars, however it’s actually cool. Nvidia has loads of image comparability sliders to point out the advantages of RTX Remix. Nvidia breaks down the method:
RTX Remix is capable of seize the textures, geometry, lighting, and cameras because of an revolutionary, customized D3D9 Runtime known as the RTX Remix Runtime. Classic video games like Morrowind use the D3D9 runtime to ship draw calls (rendering directions) to the GPU. RTX Remix Runtime intercepts these draw calls, interprets them into distinct belongings, and reassembles these belongings into an similar scene. From there, RTX Remix converts the belongings and scene into the broadly adopted Universal Scene Description (USD) open 3D framework, which is the inspiration of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for constructing and working customized 3D pipelines.