Gamebryo engine

RTX Remix was announced yesterday at NVIDIA’s keynote speech as part of their Omniverse reveal. Focusing on expanding modding capabilities for compatible titles running on DX8 and DX9 (of which there are many), it also gives modders the opportunity to introduce ray-tracing into just about any compatible title. Read on for our Q&A with NVIDIA about the possibilities of the tool!

Kicking off our talk was a presentation going deeper into the possibilities of RTX Remix and a breakdown of how results in both Morrowind and Portal were achieved. Much of this info can be found in our previous article, as well as the breakdown of Portal RTX here. We got the opportunity to answer some more specific queries, however, with Nyle Usmani and Alex Dunn, who led the charge on RTX Remix and Portal RTX!

Q: From what we gather you need a 20, 30, or 40 series card to run the tech - what would happen if someone without compatible hardware tried to run a mod? Is there a warning in place to say you don’t have compatible hardware?

A: To clarify, it’s not only NVIDIA RT cards that can run mods created by Remix - any graphics card compatible with the Vulkan API can take part. If a user were to try to play on an unsupported GPU, they would be notified, and the game would drop back to the regular game’s renderer. Between the runtime and playing the game, and between requirements, we imagine there might be a marketing solution here including sites RTX mods are hosted on to either section them off or label them as requiring a certain level of specifications with additional goodies to enjoy.

Q: What’s the compatibility with Remix with other mods in terms of adding other mods into the game particularly after Remix has been run?

A: We didn’t want to screw up existing mods out there so to that end, for Portal, we actually stack mods - using mods we created as Portal mods, as well as the RTX Remix content on top. It’s hard to say if it’ll work with every mod, but mesh and texture mods should work without issue. If you’ve done previous work in Remix, another mod on top that conflicts will cause that work to no longer apply. As a result you may want to then re-Remix the added mod.

Q: Have you given consideration to the SDKs provided by games developers and allowing Omniverse to interact with/be compatible with base game tools?

A: Assuming they’re shipped with the game and use the same renderer/baseline as the original game, Remix may be able to interact with them as well. It would be an interesting avenue to explore, providing closer compatibility between Remix and the SDKs launching with games, but we’d need to conduct further testing first.

Q: The content being exported in the examples included a lot of assets - are we expecting these mods to be physically quite large?

A: Portal RTX is around 20 gigabytes, not fully complete, which could go either way - either larger if we’ve got more content to update or smaller if we undertake more optimisation. Ultimately it depends on the art team and what they target - as we were able to put Portal RTX on Steam as an official download, we didn’t have to worry about size constraints, so we can build a 20 gigabyte remaster. Some modders may choose to do the same, but we also expect some modders could instead target a lower limit within RTX Remix so the mods are accessible to more users. There are controls in the mod system so that if a mod creator ships a number of excessive resolution textures (e.g. 8k), then those textures would only be rendered if a user had the resolution to support it; otherwise, lower resolution textures would be utilised according to what the player can support.

Q: File names generated with RTX Remix appear to just be a hash of some sort - is there scope to give content a more user-friendly name?

A: Once some content is in the tool you can rename it yourself to make it easier to identify and more user friendly. There’s a lot that could be done - maybe even using AI to identify props and name them appropriately. The UI of the tool as seen so far is still an internal build and will be changed prior to release for more user friendly response. There’s also room for cataloguing with assets created - theoretically you could identify the most commonly used assets and prioritise them in modding order, but this functionality doesn’t currently exist in the tool. USD is the base format used to describe Remix’s mods - it’s based around a layered composition, as you saw, the hash names - so if you wanted to stack multiple USD layers, you could set the hierarchy of each USD to prioritise one set of assets over another.

Q: Are there plans to support pre-DX8 and post-DX9 games in the future (Unreal 1 games, for example, tend to be pre-DX8)?

A: We have looked into DX7 and thought about adding it to the roadmap as far as expanding compatibility is concerned. Unreal Engine 1 and DX7 is definitely something interesting and possible with the current architecture; theoretically it’s a great fit, we just haven’t done the work yet to experiment with Remix. It’s too early to say for sure post-DX9 as it gets much more complicated, but it’s a natural direction for us to take the tool. We have experiments in both directions and we’ll see how that pans out to decide the path forwards.

That about wraps up our interview with NVIDIA. Do you have any more questions about Remix, or thoughts on the answers above? Discuss below, and don’t forget to check out our initial breakdown of Remix!