Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now

This is the reason it only works with directx 8 or 9: they have a pretty rigid render path with a clearly separated vertex and pixel shader pipeline.

For directx 8, you would for example specify light sources as part of special draw calls to the directx API, which makes it easier to translate them to a ray traced scene graph.

Shader tools like reshare also use heuristics to detect which of the framebuffers contains a depth map to add effects like SSAO to older games.

I imagine that rtx remix can to similar things to detect where in a shader the light coordinates are stored: after all most shaders look pretty similar when it comes to implementing a Phong shader etc.

It hooks into the DirectX fixed-function pipeline used back in the day (i.e. where you set up model/view/projection matrices and lightsource coordinates and surface materials and sent to OpenGL/Direct3D), so it knows what the programmer wanted to do, and from there it's "easy" to replace everything.

Excerpt: "Scene manager, which uses information coming through the D3D9 fixed function API to create a representation of the original scene, track game objects frame to frame, and set up the scene to be path traced."

There is increasing newfound appreciation for that early 3d visual look though. You can see that in new games being clearly inspired by that look, for example Dusk (with "overwhelmingly positive" rating): https://store.steampowered.com/app/519860/DUSK/

Maybe I spent far too much time playing Morrowind, but that place just feels homey. Low poly models and muddy textures and all.

It ended up looking similar to Oblivion. So I'd wager a guess that it was the intended aesthetic, only limited by the older technology.

The only authority here would be the original designers.

It seems you'd certainly be able to go in and just tweak the lighting without doing all the AI touchups, texture upscaling, and model swaps as they did in the video. Pretty wild stuff, either way.

It is true that it changes the aesthetic a bit, and it is a change rather than a straight upgrade.

But the old rendering pipeline still exists I guess, and the new one look wicked cool.

It seems like the big change is that the light sources now actually emit light so the scene becomes a lot brighter. Maybe part of the process should be turning down global illumination? That might make dark corners even more dark however, and "hidden" clues that were supposed to be difficult to see may become outright invisible.

Don't read too much into it. It's a tech demo for a tool. Modders are supposed to make those decisions.

I believe the DLL alone only makes the game moddable. Thereafter, there's still a lot of work to do to swap out low resolution and poly-count assets for more detailed ones.

The of the widescreen fixes for the Unreal games was the addition of a dll file in the game folder.

Would this work for counterstrike 1.6 or halflife?

Nvidia really hurt themselves with their long-standing closed source driver position. In many circles (like HN) they burned a lot of goodwill and mindshare because of their driver stance and effect it has had on Linux desktop users. It is an extremely tiny population (in terms of numbers) BUT those users (like the HN users) have an outsized impact due to the tendency for them to be in technical and decision making positions.

However, Nvidia (other than the driver) has a TON of open source work. In addition to contributions all over the place in the relevant open source ecosystems/projects they have 349 repos on Github[0]. They also have a variety of different organizations on Github (for some reason) like Triton Inference Server that has another 30 repos[1]. If you start wandering through these repos these aren't small efforts either - it's clear Nvidia puts a TON of resources and investment in open source.

At the risk of making this another Nvidia vs AMD thread, AMD (the open source desktop darling) by comparison has 39 repos on Github[2]. Their entire project for ML has a total of another 39 repos[3].

If it weren't for the proprietary closed-source desktop driver souring people it would be clear and obvious how much of a supporter of open source Nvidia is.

[0] - https://github.com/NVIDIA

[1] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server

[2] - https://github.com/amd

[3] - https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute

feel more likely to rip game assets and build in a supported engine like Unreal.

I played Max Payne recently, and didn't find a way to fix the audio problems, other than that it runs great.

MP 1 & 2 remakes are in the works by Remedy

https://www.remedygames.com/games/max-payne-remake/

Aren't there non-VAC servers you could play on?

It might be fine. If it's just messing with the way DXVK is being presented, it's not very different from the "hacking" people use to get DirectX games working on Linux. AFAIK, games aren't really picky about graphics API calls as long as everything behaves as-expected.

It’s opened now so perhaps another graphics company will invest the time to make that happen?

It is technically GPU agnostic, the injected renderer should run on any hardware that supports Vulkan raytracing. The design of the renderer certainly plays to the strengths of Nvidia's architectures though, so performance is quite bad on AMD cards.

In short, it's about the trade-off between quality and performance. Also, not all corners need to be round.

The following article provides an in-depth exploration of how polygon count affects performance.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/polycount-understanding-model...

Short answer? It depends, but “yes” is more generally going to be true than not.

The smoother the edges the more polygons there are. The more polygons there are the more work the processor has to do to render them. In a very basic sense.

Now, it is absolutely possible to round the corners without incurring heavy processing cost but then you’re probably not going to get good collision, instead you’ll get incredibly obvious clipping (when one seemingly solid object passes through another without triggering collision).

So game developers have to make a choice: look good in still photos or look good in gameplay? (Clipping is a jarring experience while playing). Bonus benefit: if you do it right the lower polygon count and less fancy graphic stuff means your game runs on a wider variety of hardware (smartphones, switch, Xbox/PlayStation, PC, specialty stuff).

And that’s all not even getting into the cost of paying an artist to round those corners. Do you balloon your art payroll and have dozens of artists working on a few hundred “perfect” assets or would you rather they work on thousands of assets that are styled consistently and damn the real world verisimilitude? Games are a passion for many but capitalism invokes a cost when making them.

There really hasn't been great automatic mesh detail scaling techniques outside of tesselation shaders and they're not super easy for an artist to work with.

Unreal 5's Nanite system is a big step up but it's brand new and unique. Not many games are out yet and no other big engines have a competitor technology.

Pretty much Eunreal Engine 5 is going to completelyt fix this, but it's pretty new. Other engine's will pick up the same techniques. In 5ish years, this problem will be long gone.

A few reasons:

- "Infinite" detail, like models that would be described by curves and others are mathematically absurdly expensive. And when you need your entire frame to be out in 16ms, there really isn't much space to keep both the advancements _and_ new very expensive math. It's done for some things like font rendering (see Slug), but it would be horrible for everything to be done that way.

- All of the tooling is still made around triangles and exporting meshes made out of triangles, because that's how everyone works.

- It's how everyone works because your GPU is good at one thing: triangles. It has dedicated units for that single goal: take triangles, and rasterize them to the screen. So, even if you made a brand new GPU with a Bézier Engine :tm: in there to make it efficient... well you still have to support all of the GPUs that only know how to do triangles, and you're back to doing math to transform these into triangles.

- Even if you do that, surprise, your screens don't do curves either, nor do your framebuffers! They're a bunch of pixels, so you just transferred your aliasing problems from "triangles along a grid don't look good" to "you need to match your curve to your grid", and if your detail becomes small enough, you now also have aliasing there.

- There's nothing that we have in this world that is round and we can't do a convincing job of with triangles. Sure, maybe something that has absurd scale, like a planet you can both see from outer space and up close: that'd be a lot of triangles to make it look smooth at all angles. It would be kind of performance wasting, but you can do it. And techniques like Nanite would actually even fix the problem a little bit.

> Is it really that hard to round those corners?

Yes.

They are unlikely to ever be 'round'. Perhaps when the entire scene, and not just reflections is rendered by raytracers. That way one can represent mathematically correct curves. At that point we'll basically be throwing away all advancements in GPU tech.

Besides, it's utterly unnecessary when we can fake roundness by increasing the number of polygons and by clever illumination.

Crysis has a DX9 mode, so maybe.

I don't think I'd go that far, haha. Building a good looking low res texture is probably harder than getting a nice modern one.

You too?

Doesn't work for Skyrim. Only old games

I could see Nvidia licensing the tech to game publishers but they didn't get much uptake, so open source it is.

What was the previous suit by rockstar. I have seen suits where people were selling mods that circumvented DRM.

The most well known example is probably the Portal mod

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZHBl5yWqJk

It has not been available, it was just released, hence the news being submitted here. Before this the only way to use it was to just take the dll from Portal RTX and try to throw it at old games hoping it would work.