Nvidia today announced that it is making significant progress in the world of RTX Remix.This opens up the technology so that mods can have unprecedented control over the entire technology. But the other side of this announcement is the release of the RTX runtime SDK, which allows developers, or anyone with access to the game's rendering pipeline, to integrate all the features of Remix into any game.

This could be a potentially big change as RTX Remix is limited to DirectX8 or DirectX9 games only. This limitation means that at the moment you only see the fancy ray tracing, AI texture replacement, and upscaling features that are used to remastering old PC classics.

That means that Half-Life2mod is in progress, Need For Speed Undercround2, and even Splinter Cell is also in progress. But it also means that many other titles are not subject to RTX Remix modding processing.

"Today we announce the next major step to make RTX Remix a fully open platform," an Nvidia representative said in a pre-Computex briefing. "On May 6 we will open source the RTX Remix Toolkit, a core remix application used to create mods and deliver AI textures.

"We are open-sourcing our tools for the mods community so they can have more control over the technology."

This is a great feature and the core of the software that provides the tools to open support for the current title even if modders meets the current specifications of Remix

But it's the 2nd bit of this announcement that could have a significant impact on the mods community. "With the release of the RTX Remix Runtime SDK, developers will be able to integrate the Remix Runtime into games and digital content creation tools that have access to rendering data. This also extends Remix Runtime compatibility.

Of course, this isn't going to make DirectX10 and 11 games compatible with Remix soon, but it's possible that the developers of certain games will go back and use the Runtime SDK to Remix renderer, but if they have access to the game's source code and renderer, they'll make it compatible. If you're smart enough, that's it.

"By making the RTX Remix Runtime SDK available, we now have easy access to Remix's renderers," Nvidia says. "Skilled programmers with access to the game's rendering pipeline can use the Sdk to natively integrate Remix's renderer and runtime capabilities. 

"We expect this to be particularly useful for developers and programmers who have access to source code and game renderers."

I'm sure Rockstar Fork has a bit of spare time at the moment to jam it into GTA V, right.

But that's not all...The last part of this new, more open RTX Remix world is what we call the RTX Remix Toolkit REST API. It is a layer that allows any application to connect to the toolkit via a live link "to aid the mods workflow.""

Examples are probably the easiest way to understand what this means. This allows you to connect Blender to a Remix so that you can pull 3D assets from the game directly into Blender, mess it up, and then go back to the Remix on the fly.

You can also hook up something like ComfyUI.ComfyUI uses a host of different generated AI models to create it from just a text prompt. An example provided by Nvidia is to get a specific texture from a game, drop it into ComfyUI, and pass it through an upscaling and PBR (physically based rendering) generation model to create a more detailed version of that texture. Then use the text prompt to change it to a whole new texture and drop it directly into the game via Remix.

It looks incredibly powerful to this layman, and I expect the opening of this remix platform to really kickstart a new wave of community remastering of updated classics. Well, as long as you can find a skilled programmer who has access to the source code, that is so.