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The classic from Valve Portal was recently re-released on Steam with some very inventive new visuals, including ray-tracing and DLSS support. It was great news for Portal fans, but it’s also great news for fans of all kinds of old PC games.
Before going any further, I will explain the technology we are talking about. RTX is the name given to a set of technologies used by graphics card company Nvidia that use “ray tracing and AI technologies” to, quite simply, make PC games look amazing. Here is a trailer for Portal with RTXthe re-release of the game made with this technology, showing the improvements made to a game that many of us strongly remember 2007:
Now, the thing with RTX is that while in this case (and with Earthquake And Minecraft) was meant to be put into the game by the developers, Nvidia is also releasing a version of the technology with modders in mind. It’s called RTX Remix:
With RTX Remix, the game runs in the background and we replace the old APIs and rendering systems with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This allows for the addition of ray tracing to classic games and everything updates in real time as lights and objects move. Light can be cast from behind the player, or from another room, and inside Portal with RTX, light also travels through portals. Glass refracts light, surfaces reflect details based on their sheen, reflections can be projected into the scene from behind the player, objects can self-reflect, and indirect off-screen light illuminates and affects what you see.
As compared to Quake II RTX And Minecraft with RTX, the path-tracing ray tracing introduced by RTX Remix is even more advanced, bouncing light four times instead of once, improving the quality, immersion and simulation of real-world light. Additionally, we’ve also introduced several new ray tracing techniques that further improve quality while being more performant.
Nvidia claims RTX Remix is ”a modding platform” that will allow “modders of all skill levels to bring ray tracing and NVIDIA technologies to classic games.” Since it won’t be out until 2023, I expected it would still be months away to see what benefits it could bring to older games, but nope!
Modders like LordVulcan I’ve found that you can add RTX juice to some classic titles, right now, and in most cases it’s done simply… by dropping some files from one folder to another on your hard drive and enabling some developer stuff in the console. That’s all. And it works on games like SWAT 4 and the original Max Payne.
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Even if the results are not perfect, at least compared to professional jobs done for months on games like Minecraft, they still look great! Here you are Max PayneFor instance, courtesy of Alex Coulter:
That lighting. Those shadows. This is magic.
Here are some videos of SWAT 4 picked up by Eiermann Televisionwhich was released in 2005 and definitely didn’t look like this at the time:
And here’s Half-Life 1, along with a little explanation of how it’s done:
None of these examples are perfect, but it’s amazing that they work so well given how quickly they’ve been implemented. It will be so good when the current RTX Remix is released in 2023, but until then it will be great to see what other classic titles this workaround is compatible with!
