NVIDIA's GDC 2026 announcements also include updates for the RTX Remix remastering platform. The biggest news is the new Advanced Particle VFX system, which will be released some time next month.
With this new system, NVIDIA is directly responding to the RTX Remix's open-source community's top feature request: a substantially more powerful and expressive particle system. The Advanced Particle VFX system introduces three distinct capability areas:
- Dynamic Animations are driven by a new curve editor that gives modders fine-grained control over how a particle changes across its entire lifespan. The controllable properties include color over time, size over time, velocity over time, and transparency over time. Rather than a particle simply fading out or scaling uniformly, modders can now sculpt a precise animation arc; for instance, a particle that starts small, rapidly expands, shifts from orange to white at peak size, then fades while slowing down. The Quake III black hole was used to showcase this feature, with rings emanating outward that dynamically change in size, colour, and transparency as they travel from the centre, creating a visually complex effect that would have been impossible (or, at least, very cumbersome) with the previous system.
- Randomized Elements address the visual repetitiveness problem that plagues particle systems in older games. When the same particle animation loops identically, the eye quickly recognises the pattern and the all-important illusion breaks. The new system introduces random animations, random flipping, and random rotations on a per-particle basis, meaning no two instances of a particle look or behave exactly the same. Quake III's lightning gun was used to illustrate this: the lightning strikes fire in different directions and orientations each time, and when the beam hits a surface, rocks and debris fly off at individually randomized sizes and trajectories, making the impact feel physically chaotic and natural rather than scripted.
- Complex Gravitational Effects significantly deepen the physics simulation underpinning the particle system. The new properties include attraction (particles drawn toward a point), magnetic repulsion (particles pushed away), wind (directional force carrying particles), air resistance (drag that slows particles over distance), new collision models (particles bouncing off or sticking to geometry), and burst modes (controlling how particles erupt from their spawn point). The showcase here was once again the Quake III black hole, with a machine gun firing particles that get pulled toward the centre, followed by a shotgun blast where the particles orbit the black hole before eventually being drawn into the void.
The other news is the availability of a Quake III RTX early access (version 0.6) made by modder Woodboy, who took it upon themselves to remaster several levels of the original game by id Software. The remaster, which Quake III owners can download for free via ModDB, has 15 levels in total, including the ‘Area 15 – NVIDIA Bunker’ custom map remastered with RTX. It features NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, path tracing, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, remade PBR assets, RTX Remix Logic, the aforementioned Advanced Particle VFX, Neural Radiance Cache, and NVIDIA Reflex.
In other NVIDIA RTX Remix news, Call of Duty 2 Remixed now supports the Logic system, allowing hotkeys to trigger changes in the weather and the time of day.
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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