Nvidia’s latest RTX Remix update brings path-traced particles to classic games — major overhaul promises 'tens of thousands' of particles without significant performance reduction

Nvidia’s modding platform for retrofitting classic games with ray tracing has just had a huge overhaul. On September 9, Nvidia announced major updates to RTX Remix, including an “advanced path-traced particle system” that adds real-time particle effects like fire and smoke with full lighting and animation controls, without touching the original game engine.

The new particle system was introduced in a standalone update to RTX Remix available through the Nvidia app. Fundamentally, the GPU particle simulation behaves like a native part of the ray-traced world, with particles casting and receiving shadows, reflecting in surfaces, and responding to both physics and the camera.

With the update, Nvidia is giving modders the kind of visual effects tools that are usually reserved for modern game engines. The company claims that “tens of thousands” of path-traced particles can be rendered “without significantly reducing performance.”

That’s a bold claim that’s likely to draw scrutiny. In previous RTX Remix projects like Portal RTX, particle-heavy scenes have pushed high-end GPUs to their limits, even with DLSS enabled. While Nvidia explicitly recommends RTX 30-series cards as the baseline for an acceptable experience, some players with 3090-class GPUs reported dips well below 60 fps in particle-heavy scenes.

The updates also introduce a more streamlined authoring workflow. Modders can now tag textures in-game as particle emitters via the Alt+X developer menu and tweak properties like size and color directly within the Remix UI. The more advanced Remix Toolkit adds scripting support for lighting behaviors and collision physics powered by PhysX in the backend, according to Nvidia’s documentation.

Nvidia says that over 165 games are compatible with RTX Remix, provided they use DX8 or DX9 with fixed-function pipeline. That still leaves plenty of room for quirks like potential crashes and rendering issues in some titles, but there’s no denying that RTX Remix is becoming a more powerful and practical tool by the month for modders committed to rebuilding classic games.

Since its release, the RTX Remix community has breathed new life into classic games like Half-Life 2, Need for Speed Underground, and Deux Ex, with more than 2 million downloads to date.

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