NVIDIA is making its presence known at GDC 2025, kicking things off with some updates to its RTX Remix tech.
While RTX Remix has been available in open beta form since January 2024, part of today's news is to announce that it's been officially released in a more complete state.
As a late-30s PC gamer with a love for older titles, RTX Remix is making me wonder if my choice to go with an AMD Radeon RX 9000 GPU in my gaming PC was the right move.
If you want to try your hand at building your own mod — which I'm inclined to do — you'll need NVIDIA RTX hardware.
The good news is that basically any GPU with Vulkan ray tracing support can run games modded with Remix.
Those who'd rather take advantage of the hard work of other modders can simply download the corresponding Remix mod and apply it to their game of choice.
Moddb seems to be the best resource for Remix mods, with a long list of old games in a playable or semi-playable state.
I certainly don't consider myself a modder, but the Remix advancements that NVIDIA shared ahead of GDC have piqued my interest enough to want to give it a shot.
With NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPU launch so far playing out with plenty of controversy, RTX Remix could be the selling feature for plenty of longtime gamers like me.
What is NVIDIA RTX Remix?
NVIDIA RTX Remix is a free modding tool that's used to remaster old games with modern lighting, models, textures, effects, and more. It runs on NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards.
However, the full Remix release comes with several enhancements that will only work with the latest RTX 5000 GPUs, which so far have been in high demand with not much stock to go around.
While DLSS 4 is available on older RTX GPUs in some capacity, only the newest hardware has access to Multi Frame Generation (MFG).
MFG (and the rest of DLSS 4's enhancements) has now been incorporated into Remix for its full release, significantly boosting performance. You can see the results in the video NVIDIA shared below.
As NVIDIA puts it:
"In the Half-Life 2 RTX demo, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation multiplies performance by 10.2X on average at 4K, using the Ultra Preset, enabling 265 FPS, high refresh rate 4K gaming on the GeForce RTX 5090."
As for enhancements available to those using RTX 40-series cards, NVIDIA says the updated DLSS Frame Generation "runs faster and uses less video memory."
And for all of NVIDIA's RTX GPUs, DLSS Ray Reconstruction provides better image quality, as you can see in the video below.
Alongside the MFG and ray reconstruction improvements, NVIDIA has introduced a Neural Radiance Cache that boosts ray-traced indirect lighting.
NVIDIA again used Half-Life 2 RTX to show off the changes; the new level of detail is quite impressive, and it's also said to boost performance by up to 15%.
NVIDIA didn't stop there, announcing some entirely new modding tools in the full Remix release.
In compatible games, character model skins can be completely replaced, and NVIDIA says its RTX Skin tool with sub-surface scattering is capable of offering "a level of realism unattainable with rasterization, previous approximated subsurface scattering techniques, and previous ray tracing techniques."
RTX Volumetrics looks impressive as well, with NVIDIA showing off a comparison screenshot from Half-Life 2 RTX.
I'll admit that I kind of slept on RTX Remix up until this point.
My Windows Central colleague, Zachary Boddy, got a first-hand look at NVIDIA Remix at GDC 2024, and they came away mighty impressed with its capabilities:
"NVIDIA showed me how easy it was to significantly alter classic games like Half-Life 2, remaining faithful to the original while introducing new 3D assets, increasing detail and visual fidelity, and introducing realistic lighting. However, NVIDIA also showed me how Remix can add entirely new content to games, such as dropping a functional disco ball into Portal."
Remix has been an impressive project since it was released in beta form, and the full release's improvements do not look, by any means, like a half measure.
While I've already decided to put an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT in my main gaming PC due to its more reasonable price and competitive performance, RTX Remix is admittedly making me rethink my decision.
I suspect that a whole lot of other gamers who grew up with '90s and early '00s games are thinking the same thing.
Talented modders have been busy at work building Remix packages that will run on other GPUs, and I'm certainly going to give them a shot.
But if I ever want to make my own project, I'll need to make the switch to NVIDIA.
What's the best way to try RTX Remix?
The RTX Remix suite of modding tools can be downloaded for free through the NVIDIA app or directly from NVIDIA's website.
As I mentioned, you need an NVIDIA RTX GPU to use Remix to mod games, but any GPU that supports Vulkan ray tracing can run the modded games.
What's perhaps more interesting for a lot of gamers is the news that a Half-Life 2 RTX demo is headed to Steam on March 18, 2025.
It's what NVIDIA has been using most so far to showcase RTX Remix, so it's bound to be an impressive accomplishment.
For many other games, I urge you to check out a list of Remix mods available at Moddb.
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