NVIDIA releases update for RTX Remix, its DX9/DX8 game modding platform

NVIDIA releases first update RTX Remix

NVIDIA has released an update to the RTX Remix runtime. This is not the full, but only part of the software platform that allows creators to modify games by adding new technologies to DirectX9 and DirectX8 games, such as NVIDIA DLSS, path tracing or AI-upscale game assets like textures.

The RTX Remix is part of the NVIDIA Studio tool set, which requires two parts: creator toolkit and runtime. The update is only for the runtime, but the toolkit is still only available to certain developers and will become ‘early access’ at some point in the future.

We are still in the early days of the Remix ‘revolution’, as NVIDIA has not yet opened its software to all game developers. However, should that happen one day, the company is ready to ’empower the mod development community’ by extending game capabilities and feature set available with Remix.

It is worth noting that RTX Remixed games can only be played on GeForce RTX graphics cards. The technology is to become fully open source at some point, but that will not change the fact that only some part of the gaming community can play those games. Unless, of course, someone mods the modding platform itself to support 3rd party vendors.

RTX Remix Runtime 0.2 changelog

• The Remix Runtime Bridge is now open source on GitHub! You can find the repo here!
• Many Bridge improvements have gone into this release to address various game compatibility issues:
  • Fixed issues with shader parser logic that helps with Shader Model 2+ games.
  • Fixed surface data pitch issue that was leading to crashes in some games.
  • Added support for games that change the main window handle on Reset().
  • Allow null vertex declaration on server to fix unnecessary failures in some situations.
  • Properly initialize render state according to the official DirectX9 documentation to fix geometry corruption in some games.
  • Handle CreateTextureXXX() calls with levels = 0 to fix geometry corruption in some games.
  • Fixed mouse input processing for games where the mouse pointer would not move in the game or with the Remix menu opened, and added other DirectInput fixes for games using different exclusive modes. Also added optional input message pump hook that is needed for some games.
  • Better matching of the native D3D9 behavior when dealing with shaders and swapchain initialization.
  • Added more input validation on client and server side – the server is now properly returning failure codes to the client where failure is allowable.
  • Added DPI awareness to the bridge client so that the game window gets scaled and mouse input is handled properly on displays with higher than 100% DPI.
  • Optimized how the SharedHeap works to reduce crashes at launch and require less finetuning of its settings. Since the SharedHeap can still lead to issues in certain games we switched it to be turned off by default, but it can be enabled in bridge.conf with the useSharedHeap setting.
  • Added forced window client option client.forceWindowed to bridge.conf.
• DXVK-Remix improvements and game compatibility fixes:
  • Improvements to culling issues–Remix now includes an initial set of heuristics to work around engine-side culling.
  • Improved handling of alpha-tested geometry that uses fractional (“feathered”) alpha.
  • Improved detection of shadow volumes.
  • Support for capturing normals in vertex capture path.
• Improvements to RTX Remix menus and documentation: expanded and clarified the existing documentation, and added tooltips in the UI to make it more accessible.
• Debug symbols for the release are now available in a separate remix-0.2.0-symbols.zip package to make debugging the source code from the compiled binaries easier.

Source: NVIDIA