NVIDIA RTX Remix Open Beta Q&A with Nyle Usmani – Past, Present and Future of the Generalized Modding Platform

Today, almost a year and a half after the modding platform's announcement, NVIDIA releases the highly anticipated RTX Remix creator toolkit Open Beta. While the runtime has been available for some time, the public availability of the creator toolkit should really kickstart the modders' work to easily remaster classic PC games with cutting-edge rendering features like path tracing, DLSS 3, and AI-upscaled assets. NVIDIA is also partnering with ModDB to make it easier for users to check out which games are compatible with RTX Remix and to get the optimized configuration files to run the mods.

There's a series of improvements to the new version of the runtime as well, such as Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) being supported to make 2D textures look tridimensional and Subsurface Scattering (SSS) now working on foliage.

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Last week, I had the pleasure of talking for almost an hour with NVIDIA's RTX Remix Product Manager Nyle Usmani about the past, present, and future of this ambitious generalized modding platform, including the thorny subject of potential paid mods made with the tool.

Nyle, can you talk about how the RTX Remix project got started to begin with?

Yeah, that's an interesting one. When Lightspeed Studios started getting into experimenting with classic games and seeing where we could bring path tracing into content ahead of the curve, ahead of when most gaming companies would have been able to implement it, it came from us looking backward and seeing how impressive we could revitalize classic content that had more simple geometry where you could drop in extremely futuristic cutting edge lighting systems and still have it run in real time.

At the start of the RTX generation, we were looking at classic content. You're probably familiar with Quake II RTX. We also did Minecraft RTX and then the person who led that project started experimenting with this idea of, well, we've hooked lighting