Yesterday, modder mstewart401 uploaded UnrealRTX, a remaster of the classic 1998 first-person shooter game powered by NVIDIA's RTX Remix platform, on ModDB.
UnrealRTX allows players to experience the full single player campaign (no multiplayer, unfortunately) with fully ray-traced global illumination, dynamic shadows, volumetric lighting and stunning emissive effects that, according to the modder, bring a whole new atmosphere to every level.
The addition of PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials means that the surfaces now respond to light with realistic metallics, roughness, subsurface scattering and depth. Specific world geometry and props have also been replaced to enhance fidelity.
The modder revealed that most of the texture replacements were generated using RTX Remix's AI tools. They also used NVIDIA assets from NVIDIA Omniverse to replace the vegetation and add grass to outdoor areas. To do that, they extensively used UnrealED to insert dummy objects, which were later replaced with custom grass models. UnrealED was also used to place new light sources where the original maps had unmotivated lighting. As RTX Remix generally replaces assets globally, mstewart401 used UnrealED to create texture variants that enabled the implementation of emissive lights with different colours and properties to achieve the same in-game texture variation. The modder said that nearly all the emissive maps and around 90% of the height maps were crafted manually in MS Paint by blacking out non-emissive pixels and outlining textures.
The UnrealRTX modder admits the file size (currently at 48.29 GB) is a bit much. The goal is to reduce it by using lower resolution roughness and normal maps, as both are currently set to 8K each, which is probably overkill.
More and more PC classics are being remastered with RTX Remix. Just recently, we covered Left 4 Dead 2 RTX NDT and GTA IV (although the latter is still not available to the public).
Which PC game would you like to see enhanced with RTX technologies? Let us know in the comments!
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