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Nvidia has just released a new update for RTX Remix, its modding platform designed to retrofit old games with modern lighting and materials. RTX Remix 1.5 brings a bunch of improvements, but the highlight feature is the improved RTX IO storage compression that can cut down on the size of modded games. The update also adds agentic AI in the form of RTX Remix Skills, along with Smooth Normals for more natural-looking geometry.
Let's start with RTX IO, which is by no means a new technology — it was introduced back in 2020 with the RTX 30 series — but it's now integrated in RTX Remix. Upgrading old games with fully ray-traced lighting, along with sharper textures, skyrockets their sizes. The original assets aren't replaced either since RTX Remix intercepts the game at runtime and simply injects the new assets on top while suppressing the older ones.
Now, thanks to new compression options in the packaging workflow, RTX IO can help reduce those ballooning file sizes considerably. Currently, Portal with RTX, Portal: Prelude RTX, and Half-Life 2 RTX demo support this feature. As such, the Half-Life 2 RTX demo has shrunk down from 80GB to just 50GB, constituting a 37.5% decrease, while Portal with RTX is now only 17GB instead of the 27GB it was previously.
RTX Remix 1.5 also brings a highly requested community feature called "Smooth Normals." Basically, once older geometry was upgraded with modern lighting, some elements would look blocky, almost as if anti-aliasing was turned off. Smooth Normals fixes this by making those assets look smoother and more lifelike. Traditionally, this is a manual process, but the new update now generates smooth normals automatically.
Lastly, RTX Remix Skills is now available in the modding platform, where you can use agents to help you accelerate your workflow. Nvidia pitches this as a lower barrier to entry for modding, even without coding skills or experience, and for remastering modern games that don't have fixed-function pipelines. Apparently, Dark Souls, Dragon Age: Origins, and Titanfall 2 are already in the process of being upgraded thanks to "this streamlined approach."
Today, RTX Remix is publicly available and open source, so you don't even need an Nvidia GPU to enjoy these modded games, and there's actually a pretty solid selection of them over at ModDB. You definitely, however, need an Nvidia GPU to develop/make the mods; you can grab RTX Remix right from the Nvidia App. The Remix agent instruction files for your preferred coding agent are available on GitHub.
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