NVIDIA Announces DX8/9 RTX Modding Tool news

NVIDIA’s new tool, RTX Remix, has just been announced. Tapping directly into the technology of DirectX, it begins to open up universal modding in any compatible game, providing access to many games previously considered unmoddable. Read on for our overview of the tool!

As a surprise announcement revealed as part of an NVIDIA Keynote today, a new tool titled RTX Remix was revealed. The tool taps right into the DirectX framework - a key bit of graphics API in most games - to allow for the extraction and modification, then reimport, of content from any compatible game. Whilst community-made tools like Ninjaripper have had the ability to rip out content from games before, reimporting modified features into an otherwise unmoddable game required committed hobbyist scenes significant iteration to get anywhere, and even then these modifications would often be limited in scope. Remix’s scope, however, is aiming to be reliable from the outset and universal across supported games.

Remix can rip out textures and models from a game and allow for their modification without any coding knowledge - once the tool is set up, you can extract the content into a common format and make your edits. Many of the examples given of what’s possible with the technology feature HD packs and that sort of thing, since the tool presents plenty of opportunities for upscaling and improving base textures in games. AI algorithms are part of the "Remix" process, using deep-learning to identify details and enhance them. Naturally, though, being able to modify textures opens up potential for mods great and small, from small fixes, to community patches, to total artistic overhauls of some great but previously untouched games.

Remix can also add real-time raytracing to any game compatible with the tool, automatically detecting light sources in a game scene and extrapolating that lighting data to create more realistically lit environments. This isn’t like Reshade’s screen space modifications - this is real-time, properly imported ray-tracing at the fingertips of countless games. Other environmental features can also be picked up by the tool and enhanced in much the same way, meaning even without extracting content, modern technology can be incorporated in older games with reasonable ease of use for even an amateur enthusiast.

When a mod is finished being put together - textures, models, and whatever other bells and whistles you’ve whipped up - the tool can then automatically repack all of the modified content into a form easily transferable to others and easily installed into a game’s directory, where it’ll be picked up by the title in question. Remix’s mods are not mutually exclusive with either each other or with hand-made content, so if you’re using the tool to smooth out a process in one game and making edits by hand as well, all the content you’re creating can work in tandem. No code access is required to make these changes - the tool handles all heavy lifting, including customisation options available at run-time.

To run the tool, you will require an NVIDIA card, and adding raytracing will, naturally, require a raytrace compatible graphics card as well, but the end result can be used by anyone with compatible hardware. The full feature set of the tool is yet to be revealed, but we’ll soon have the opportunity to find out Remix’s capabilities. ModDB would love to host content created with the tool, and we’ll also be working to provide some example mods using the tool as a demonstration of what’s now possible. You can check out the second part of our coverage here, where we had a Q&A session with NVIDIA about Remix!

Do you plan on using Remix for your next project? Discuss in the comments below and add your creation to ModDB if you do!