NVIDIA RTX Remix 1.5 Update Brings Path Tracing and AI Coding Skills with Improved Storage Efficiency for Classic PC Games
NVIDIA released an update on its modding platform called RTX Remix 1.5. This is a platform of tools for developers to transform PC games by bringing path tracing technology to classic PC titles. Version 1.5 introduces a more efficient runtime and a simpler packaging pipeline. Modders may use the tool with their choice of the direct download from GitHub, or download it with the new NVIDIA App.
Some major changes with the update are the automatically smoothed normals for legacy geometry, a request from modders. The program smooths out captured legacy geometry so that older assets are not blocky and faceted when lit with a modern path trace. Developers will also have more organized control over their lights with a new unified lights menu with controllable visibility toggles and intensity sliders.
This version is more efficient with storage thanks to the new RTX IO technology. This system uses GPU decompression to reduce the amount of time that it takes for a game to load, as well as free up CPU space during texture streaming. RTX Remix 1.5 now offers new compression options for the packaging tool, allowing the use of split size presets for compressed assets from 1GB up to 16GB. This technology can now be found in some of NVIDIA’s current official remasters, such as Portal with RTX, Portal Prelude RTX, and the Half Life 2 RTX demo. These have been successful: Portal with RTX's install footprint has been reduced from 25 GB to 17 GB, while Half Life 2 RTX on Steam has been shrunk from 80 GB to 50 GB.
Manually remaking and checking for compatibility in some cases are both time consuming and require detailed knowledge of coding. This problem has been reduced with the help of AI skills. These are sets of instructions that give a text based coding AI specific contextual information for the functional task at hand. By feeding these instructions to an AI coding agent, the system can handle the tasks of unit testing, creating feature branches, and creating a merge request for its work.
Developers would then become the creative directors instead of coding everything themselves in C++ or Python. This approach of automated coding has already helped community developers shorten the months long coding process for new Remixed titles from multiple months of manual C++ development, to mere weeks through repeated iterations and automated creation. This has enabled active development to begin on the previously incompatible titles of Dragon Age Origins, Dark Souls, and Titanfall 2.
A creator can follow this simple set of steps in order to create a remixed version of a game: first, the user chooses their preferred coding AI tool. Then, the user downloads the instructions, as stated, from the GitHub repository. At that point, the user will fork the Remix game that they want to modify and, in the session of said game, prompt the AI assistant in English what they want to achieve. Then the user would test the AI’s generated code in a loop to find flaws in its code and submit it to a merge request.
For those looking to install the remixed game and try out the remasters, NVIDIA recommends going to the verified hosting site ModDB and joining a community showcase in the Discord channels. Continue receiving driver updates and software through GeForce drivers.
