Valve’s classical Portal was precocious re-released connected Steam with immoderate precise fancy caller visuals, including ray-tracing and DLSS support. That was large quality for Portal fans, but it’s besides large quality for fans of each kinds of aged PC games.

Before we spell immoderate further, I’ll explicate the tech we’re talking about. RTX is the sanction fixed to a acceptable of technologies utilized by graphics paper institution Nvidia that uses “ray tracing and AI technologies” to, precise simply, marque PC games look incredible. Here’s a trailer for Portal With RTX, the re-release of the crippled made with this tech, showing the improvements made to a crippled that astir of america retrieve looking precise 2007:

Now, the happening with RTX is that portion successful this lawsuit (and with Quake and Minecraft) it had to beryllium enactment into the crippled by developers, Nvidia are besides releasing a mentation of the tech with modders successful mind. It’s called RTX Remix:

With RTX Remix, the crippled runs successful the inheritance and we regenerate the aged rendering APIs and systems with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This enables the summation of ray-tracing to classical games and it each updates successful real-time arsenic lights and objects move. Light tin beryllium formed from down the player, oregon from different room, and successful Portal with RTX, airy adjacent travels done portals. Glass refracts light, surfaces bespeak item based connected their glossiness, reflections tin beryllium formed into the country from down the player, objects tin self-reflect, and indirect airy from off-screen illuminates and affects what you see.

Compared to Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTX, the path-traced ray tracing introduced by RTX Remix is adjacent much advanced, bouncing airy 4 times alternatively of once, improving quality, immersion, and the simulation of real-world light. Additionally, we’ve besides introduced respective caller ray tracing techniques that further amended prime portion besides being much performant.

Nvidia says that RTX Remix is “a modding platform” that volition let “modders of each quality levels to bring ray tracing and NVIDIA technologies to classical games”. Given it’s not retired until 2023 I was expecting we were inactive months distant from seeing what benefits it could bring to older games, but nope!

Modders similar LordVulcan person recovered you tin adhd RTX foodstuff to immoderate classical titles, close now, and successful astir cases it’s done conscionable by...dropping immoderate files from 1 folder to different connected your hard thrust and enabling immoderate developer worldly successful the console. That’s it. And it’s moving connected games similar SWAT 4 and the archetypal Max Payne.

While the results aren’t perfect, at slightest compared to the nonrecreational jobs done implicit months connected games similar Minecraft, they inactive look fantastic! Here’s Max Payne, for example, courtesy of Alex Coulter:

That lighting. Those shadows. This is magic.

Here’s immoderate footage of SWAT 4 taken by EiermannTelevision, which was released successful 2005 and astir decidedly did not look similar this astatine the time:

And here’s Half-Life 1, on with a small explainer connected however it was done:

None of those examples are perfect, but it’s unthinkable they enactment this good fixed however speedy their implementation was. This is going to beryllium truthful bully erstwhile the existent RTX Remix is released successful 2023, but until past it’s going to beryllium chill seeing what different classical titles this slapdash workaround is compatible with!