This is why we don't need Valve to remaster Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 RTX has become the biggest mod project because of Nvidia | RTX Remix 'is the great equaliser' bringing veteran and hobbyist devs together to remaster the most beloved and best PC games | Corsair TC200 | Leatherette | 4D armrests | 180 degree recline | $219.99 at Corsair (save $180)
Created for ignoble.experiment@arconati.us | Web Version
Say what you want about Nvidia—about its historic anti-competitive nature, its spectacularly high prices, and questionable GPU tiering structure—there are some things it's very, very good at: Making powerful graphics cards, and pushing PC gaming ever forward. And that's not just when it comes to the very latest in cutting edge graphical effects or AI-based upscaling, sometimes it just gives us fun toys to play with.
RTX Remix is a perfect example. It's a set of tools that empowers anyone to pull apart classic PC games of the past and effectively create their own remasters using techniques, features, and assets from today.
Our Jacob's been talking to Nvidia and some of the modders taking up the challenge laid down by RTX Remix to create stunning remasters of Half-Life 2 and Need For Speed Underground.
RTX Remix enables modders to breathe new life into beloved videogames. The platform, created by Nvidia, replaces the very core of classic games to take advantage of advanced modern features, such as path-traced lighting, enhanced assets, and upscaling. What's most exciting about RTX Remix, however, is how it appears to have motivated the modding community worldwide to take on grand new projects. I've spoken to developers working on the most popular ones today to find out why that is.
RTX Remix is a collection of software that allows games mainly built on DirectX 8/9 to support modern lighting methods and assets. To do that, it replaces entire chunks of a classic game to form a new rendering pipeline almost entirely removed from the one that shipped with the original game.
"The main thing that Remix does is that it introduces a brand new rendering engine…" says Traggey, a developer and modder working on multiple RTX Remix projects. "It allows us to mod the game in a way that pushes it to a quality level where it's actually comparable to modern triple-A releases."
RTX Remix is made up of two main parts:
Runtime—Includes the Bridge, which handles the conversion of the old runtime, and the Renderer, which offers access to a Physically Based Rendering (PBR) pipeline including an open-source path tracer. It can also 'capture' game assets in Universal Scene Description (USD) format.
Creator Toolkit—The RTX Remix application for manipulating and replacing USD assets.
Though born out of Nvidia's internal projects, such as Quake 2 RTX and Portal RTX, the platform is now available to anyone in beta and is already being used far and wide. It's most famously attracted some of the biggest Half-Life 2 modders to take on a massively ambitious project: a complete remaster of one of the best PC games ever made.
You can pick up the Corsair TC200 for less than the usual price of a TC100 right now, the chair we normally hail as the best budget gaming chair. We feel the TC200 offers a sturdy and comfortable base on which to rest your posterior for gaming, but you can read all about our thoughts in our review.
While Nvidia's replacement for the RTX 4080 is only a little bit faster, the MSRP of the RTX 4080 Super is also a fair bit lower at $999. We've found just one card at that sort of price today, however. That's this Zotac, which should be a pretty cool and quiet card.
One of our absolute favorite SSDs this, and while it might not technically be on discount it's still a fantastic price for everything you're getting here. Check out our review of the 4TB model for more, but the cliff notes are that its fast, efficient, and pretty much everything you could want from a good Gen 4 NVMe drive, for less.
The Zephyrus G14 is a force to be reckoned with in 2024. It's taken the foundations of the best 14-inch gaming laptop and improved it in every way, including an all-metal chassis design and gorgeous OLED panel. Razer better watch its back.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.