“The old games were the best!” We hear it everywhere, we say it ourselves. Today everything is different. Gelu himself even recently prepared a thread about his beloved Heroes 3. But whether the older games were truly better or we’re just talking about nostalgia is a discussion for another time. However, the truth is that the desire to play and enjoy games from about 20 years ago again it just exists there, unmistakably. However, most people take a cold shower when they turn on their childhood game and see that it doesn’t look nearly as good as they imagined. Rose-colored glasses and all that, you know. But with Nvidia’s RTX Remix, that’s no longer necessarily the case..
We first heard about this gadget about a year and a half ago. We made a video about this ourselves on Techfeed. However, technology was most visible in the context of the project. PTX portal. A remaster of Valve’s famous logic game, which not only adds path tracing – or an improved form of ray tracing – but also improves various models, textures, general lighting and adds support for DLSS upscaling technology. Portal was the first project to run directly on the RTX Remix platform. And now it is gradually falling into the hands of each of us.. What does this mean in theory? With thousands of games being remastered, the bag might break in the foreseeable future. At least that’s the vision. However, let’s take it step by step and find out what RTX Remix actually is, how it works, and also what its limitations are. This may lead to a revolution, but it will happen with a hefty dose of large BUT.
The simplest of them is RTX Remix. Doesn’t work in all games. This mainly applies to those published sometime between 2000 and 2005/06. This is because these games run on what is called fixed function pipeline. Try to think of game rendering as an assembly line, at the beginning of which you only have rough numbers and orders, and at the end the final product comes out. It used to be like this fixed function pipeline – let’s call it that from now on SZP – worked more than well for the developers’ needs. Whenever there was a new technology or way to improve rendering, a module designed to do just that was put on the pipeline. Complex models were created from simple shapes, additional layers were added to simple textures, for example for roughness and depth, more attention was paid to light and shadows… At the same time, FFP presented a problem in that that it was not very modular. These steps were more or less fixed; minimal modularity meant that many developers relied on predefined functionality and rendering that didn’t allow them to push the envelope as much as they wanted, technically and graphically, so to speak. However, these predefined steps are exactly what RTX Remix allows us to use today.
This technology will look at the entire assembly line and add other modules, other steps, and other capabilities that could have been done before, but there just wasn’t enough hardware to do it. Today everything is different. The entire rendering process can literally be reprogrammed and edited on the fly. A breakthrough in this regard occurred with the advent of so-called shaders, i.e. exactly those same programmable blocks. Since rendering no longer resembles a fixed production process, it is almost impossible to interfere with it. However, this has also undergone an evolution, and the first two shader versions can still be carried over from RTX Remix in a sense. We’ve had some bad luck since a certain point, especially since the transition to DirectX 9.0c, which was created in 2004 and brought the third shader model.
The ideal titles for zRemixing are games with a predetermined, clear and predictable path, similar to a river. For some titles it will be possible to add a secondary stream with realistic reflections, for some we will have to make do with a stream of more realistic materials, and some streams may be so flooded that we won’t even be able to build a dam. on them. Some games can work this way, some halfway, others not.. And thanks to this, we will have the main technical part behind us, and we can start practicing.
In addition to the Portal, we were able to see, for example, in action updated version of Half-Life 2. These two projects alone can do a great job of showing us what we can expect from RTX Remix in people’s hands for the foreseeable future. In Max Payne, lighting is greatly improved thanks to path tracing, and textures are equipped with so-called PBR, that is, physically based rendering layers. They actually determine how light should behave towards them. So we’re talking about reflectivity, transparency, roughness, haze and everything that determines how light reacts to any material.
Source :Indian TV
