Despite not officially being out yet, RTX Remix is proving to be an incredible tool for upscaling and improving lighting in classic games, like Max Payne and SWAT 4. This comes with the release of Portal RTX – a remaster of Valve’s 2007 puzzle game classic from GPU manufacturer Nvidia – as plenty of skilled fans and developers are managing to get the unreleased Nvidia RTX Remix working on a series of older titles, with astounding (if sometimes glitchy) results.
People are dropping the RTX Remix files from Nvidia’s Portal RTX into other games, from the likes of Half-Life 2, the original Deus Ex, Max Payne, and SWAT 4. Some of these examples run much better than others, but with some fine tuning and the full release from Nvidia plenty of classic games are sure to get a well-deserved face lift. That said, you’ll need to enable Nvidia DLSS to run Portal RTX at max settings, so hopefully you have some spare cash.
3D animator and artist Alex Coulter responded to a thread of SWAT 4 images showing Nvidia RTX Remix enhancements with some screenshots of the original Max Payne from 2001, and the results are (mostly) astounding, which you can see below.
Coulter calls RTX Remix a “fantastic starting point,” adding that he “was screaming when it loaded in game. Managed to bring down roughness values and fix flickering alpha decals, but it disables certain objects on walls, and gates.
“All outside building textures are broken, and the mouse barely works if it shows up,” Coulter adds, calling this work “a start.”
Max Payne 1 works. Still some issues but fantastic starting point. https://t.co/0u0zoGiND1 pic.twitter.com/Y3lJdzOzLe
— Alex (@Acoulte93) December 11, 2022
One of the Max Payne RTX screenshots is clearly broken, with it looking more like the inside of Futurama’s depiction of the internet than a game about loss and bullet time dives, but these road bumps are to be expected. Even so, the before and after pictures from Coulter are quite literally night and day in terms of ambient lighting in some instances.
SWAT 4 appears to fair a lot better, with Beyond 3D forum user Lord Vulkan showing some impressive results that are “barely tweaked, only skybox textures defined.”
YouTuber 2kliksphilip also recently uploaded a video where they apparently dropped Half-Life 2 maps into the Portal RTX map folders, which sees the FPS game take advantage of Nvidia RTX Remix as well. It’s still a buggy mess, but you can see the lighting improvements almost straight away.
So, this doesn’t exactly prove that Half-Life 2 can be easily blended with Nvidia RTX Remix, as it’s just the map folders for the Valve shooter in it’s fellow puzzle game, but it certainly does show how brilliant it could be to see yet another visual overhaul for the classic FPS.
If all this RTX talk has you interested in the insides of your PC we’ve got a list of the best graphics card options for your rig, and then the best PC games for you to test the new and overpowered processor on.
