A few months after the public release of the GTA 4 RTX Remix mod, modder xoxor4d has now released an add-on mod that injects approximately 18K PBR (physically based rendering) textures, mostly roughness/normal maps and a few height maps, into the game, further improving its visuals.
The modder explained that the textures were not manually created. Instead, xoxor4d used a custom build of the GTA 4 RTX Remix mod (available here and called AutoPBR) to dump textures at runtime whenever they were used for rendering. The compatibility mod provided additional information about each texture via the RTX Remix API. Then, texture associations were built, and a USDA file with overwrites was generated. Further processing of the dumped textures was carried out to convert DX9 normal maps to Remix-compatible normal maps, and specular maps were converted to roughness maps using Python scripts.
Because of the automatic process behind the PBR conversion, the modder clarified that some textures 'here and there' might look broken. Still, in most cases, it's a noticeable improvement over the game's original textures.
Physically Based Rendering was not yet a thing in the games industry when Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto 4 in 2008. The first games to use PBR were launched in 2013: Dontnod's sci-fi action game Remember Me (made in Unreal Engine 3), Crytek's Ryse: Son of Rome (made in CryEngine), and Guerrilla's Killzone: Shadow Fall (made in Decima Engine). The big difference is that, with PBR, materials respond realistically to lighting.
This is all the more important for the GTA 4 RTX Remix mod, which enables path tracing and thus benefits immensely from PBR textures. Of course, it's not quite the same thing as if a Rockstar artist had handcrafted them.
In other RTX Remix news, NVIDIA released the new Logic system yesterday. Modders can now add dynamic visual effects to their mods that are triggered based on in-game events. We'll see if xoxor4d decides to introduce it to this GTA 4 RTX Remix mod.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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