A while back, we reported that Portal was getting a full Nvidia RTX overhaul (open in new tab), created in-house at Nvidia's Lightspeed Studios and using an Omniverse tool called RTX Remix (open in new tab).

This was accomplished by using an Omniverse tool called RTX Remix (open in new tab).

The beauty of this tool is not only the fact that old Valve classics can be played in all their ray-traced glory (as free DLC), but also the fact that ray tracing can be easily added to almost anything (open in new tab), meaning that we are now up to our eyeballs in RTX mods.

Joining the ever-growing list, modders on the Beyond3D forum (opens in new tab) have put RTX into Valve's classic Half-Life 2, Max Payne, and even SWAT 4. And they look great.

Admittedly, the Max Payne RTX mod is still a bit funky in terms of textures, which dampens the clean lighting effects. This is due to the fact that we do not yet have access to Nvidia Remix's AI texture super-resolution tools.

As reported by Wccftech (opens in new tab), modder acoulte93 managed to get the Max Payne RTX Mod working only by utilizing Crosire's d3d8to9 tool (opens in new tab) on Github . It is a "pseudo-driver module" that helps Direct3D 8 compatibility by "converting all API calls and low-level shaders to equivalent Direct3D 9 ones" The shader support in Direct 3D 9 is much better than in previous versions.

User Lord Vulkan said in a Twitter post by Alexander Battaglia that he packed the RTX Remix files into SWAT 4 "basically without tweaks."

Of course, as Nvidia admits in a small disclaimer at the bottom of the Remix application, compatibility issues may arise when using Portal RTX files with other games. However, for the aforementioned games, it seems to work, at least for the most part.

This magical RTXing is aided by the ReSTIR (open in new tab) tool, which can render lighting directly "from millions of dynamic light sources." Direct Illumination (open in new tab) can be used with the RTX 4080 (open in new tab) It also helps to make millions of lights actually possible in a single game scene without bricking even something like.

In case you didn't know, game lighting is quite resource-intensive, and itch.io is full of horror games with terrible lighting, including mine.

Nvidia recommends at least a GeForce RTX 3060 (open in new tab) to play Portal RTX at 1080p on high graphics settings, and the newfound RTX versions of Max Payne, Half-Life 2, or SWAT 4 The story is probably the same if you want to enjoy the game on a

Without this minimum GPU spec, Nvidia says you won't be able to achieve a "playable" frame rate of around 30 fps. In any case, it's great to see people getting creative with the tools Nvidia has provided, even if AMD gamers (open in new tab) may be left a bit behind, without the help of DLSS, running these RTX mods Might be.