RTX Portal launched a few days ago (alongside an optimized GeForce Game Ready driver) as the first example of a classic PC game remade with the RTX Remix Tool.

More than three years ago, we first learned that NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Studios team was recruiting for a remastering program on the heels of Quake II RTX. Fast forward to now, and Lightspeed Studios has delivered an absolutely impressive showcase with Portal RTX, arguably one of the most technologically advanced games available today.

Valve’s classic looks fantastic with full path tracing, where every ray of light is simulated to realistic properties. According to Lightspeed Studios, there are up to four times more light bounces in Portal RTX than in Quake II RTX, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are also brand new algorithms that we already discussed when they were first unveiled as research papers, like REST (Resampling of the spatio-temporal significance of the reservoir) and direct lightingwhich greatly increases the number of lights that can be added to a game scene.

Beyond Portal RTX, however, most modders were understandably excited about the prospect of getting their hands on RTX Remix. Its potential in remastering classic PC games is amazing, after all, and some enterprising users on the Beyond3D forum were so impatient that they just dropped Portal RTX in other titles, and it worked (mostly) in Half-Life 2 and SWAT 4.

To be more precise, they dropped the .trex folder and the d3d9.dll, dxvk_d3d9.dll and NvRemixBridge32.dll files in the EXE folder of these games. Both of the aforementioned games immediately look much better thanks to path tracing ported from Portal RTX, although there are obviously bugs and things that don’t work right out of the box because it’s not an officially published tool.

Half Life 2

SWAT 4

Interestingly, NVIDIA imagined fans trying it out. In the SWAT 4 screenshots, you can read a disclaimer in the bottom left where NVIDIA notes that this version would cause compatibility issues when used with games other than Portal RTX.

Here’s a SWAT 4 video grabbed by EiermannTelevision, if you’d rather see footage.

As mentioned in the title, there’s also a bonus example of RTX Remix’s potential: Max Payne. 3D artist/animator @acoulte93 demonstrated that the Remedy title works and gets a massive lighting boost even with all the limitations currently imposed by forcing it into Portal RTX.

We reached out to @acoulte93, who kindly provided additional screenshots and some answers. Many users have wondered how he even made Max Payne work, and the answer is that he used Crosire’s d3d8to9 wrapper tool. He also confirmed that there is currently no access to one of the key aspects of RTX Remix: the AI ​​Texture Super Resolution tool. As such, the textures are still the original ones, toning down the modernized effect somewhat. Additionally, the RTX menu is currently a bit buggy and only a few of the listed settings are available for tweaks.

Even with all these limitations, this simple overview of RTX Remix is more than enough to make modders and gamers are salivating at the remastering possibilities. You can sign up for the RTX Remix beta on the NVIDIA website for now, but we’ll let you know as soon as the full tool is publicly available.