Drop It Like It's Mod: Breathing New Life Into Classic Games With AI in NVIDIA RTX Remix

PC game modding is massive, with over 5 billion mods downloaded annually. Mods push graphics forward with each GPU generation, extend a game's lifespan with new content and attract new players.

NVIDIA RTX Remix is a modding platform for RTX AI PCs that lets modders capture game assets, automatically enhance materials with generative AI tools and create stunning RTX remasters with full ray tracing. Today, RTX Remix exited beta and fully launched with new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series neural rendering technology and many community-requested upgrades.

Since its initial beta release, RTX Remix has been experimented with by over 30,000 modders, bringing ray-traced mods of hundreds of classic titles to over 1 million gamers.

RTX Remix supports a host of AI tools, including NVIDIA DLSS 4, RTX Neural Radiance Cache and the community-published AI model PBRFusion 3.

Modders can build 4K physically based rendering (PBR) assets by hand or use generative AI to accelerate their workflows. And with a few additional clicks, RTX Remix mods support DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. DLSS' new transformer model and the first neural shader, Neural Radiance Cache, provide enhanced neural rendering performance, meaning classic games look and play better than ever.

Generative AI Texture Tools RTX Remix's built-in generative AI texture tools analyze low-resolution textures from classic games, generate physically accurate materials - including normal and roughness maps - and upscale the resolution by up to 4x. Many RTX Remix mods have been created incorporating generative AI.

Earlier this month, RTX Remix modder NightRaven published PBRFusion 3 - a new AI model that upscales textures and generates high-quality normal, roughness and height maps for physically-based materials.

PBRFusion 3 consists of two custom-trained models: a PBR model and a diffusion-based upscaler. PBRFusion 3 can also use the RTX Remix application programming interface to connect with ComfyUI in an integrated flow. NightRaven has packaged all the relevant pieces to make it easy to get started.

The PBRFusion3 page features a plug-and-play package that includes the relevant ComfyUI graphs and nodes. Once installed, remastering is easy. Select a number of textures in RTX Remix's Viewport and hit process in ComfyUI. This integrated flow enables extensive remasters of popular games to be completed by small hobbyist mod teams.

RTX Remix and REST API RTX Remix Toolkit capabilities are accessible via REST API, allowing modders to livelink RTX Remix to digital content creation tools such as Blender, modding tools such as Hammer and generative AI apps such as ComfyUI.

For example, through REST API integration, modders can seamlessly export all game textures captured in RTX Remix to ComfyUI and enhance them in one big batch before automatically bringing them back into the game. ComfyUI is RTX-accelerated and includes thousands of generative AI models to try, helping reduce the time to remaster a game scene and providing many ways to process textures.

Modders have many super resolution and PBR models to choose from, including ones that feature metallic and height maps unlocking 8x or more resolution increases. Additionally, ComfyUI enables modders to use text prompts to generate new details in textures, or make grand stylistic departures by changing an entire scene's look with a single text prompt.

Half-Life 2 RTX' Demo Half-Life 2 owners can download a free Half-Life 2 RTX demo from Steam, built with RTX Remix, starting March 18. The demo showcases Orbifold Studios' work in Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt ahead of the full game's release at a later date.

Half-Life 2 RTX showcases the expansive capabilities of RTX Remix and NVIDIA's neural rendering technologies. DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation multiplies frame rates by up to 10x at 4K. Neural Radiance Cache further accelerates ray-traced lighting. RTX Skin enhances Father Grigori, headcrabs and zombies with one of the first implementations of subsurface scattering in ray-traced gaming. RTX Volumetrics add realistic smoke effects and fog. And everything interplays and interacts with the fully ray-traced lighting.

What's Next in AI Starts Here From the keynote by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday, March 18, to over 1,000 inspiring sessions, 300+ exhibits, technical hands-on training and tons of unique networking events - NVIDIA's own GTC is set to put a spotlight on AI and all its benefits.

Experts from across the AI ecosystem will share insights on deploying AI locally, optimizing models and harnessing cutting-edge hardware and software to enhance AI workloads - highlighting key advancements in RTX AI PCs and workstations. RTX AI Garage will be there to share highlights of the latest advancements coming to the RTX AI platform.

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LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/rtx-ai-garage-rtx-remix/...
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