[Digital Foundry] Path-Traced Black Mesa, Call of Duty 2, Republic Commando, NFS Underground - RTX Remix Showcase!

Wolzard

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  • RTX Remix transforms old rasterized games into visually stunning ones with full path‑traced lighting, when modders invest time and effort.
  • The Black Mesa RTX Remix demo overhauls lighting, reflections, materials (with grime, scratches, and proper normal maps) while preserving the game's original art style. It replaces baked static diffuse textures with realistic metal surfaces and dynamic light behavior.
  • The Call of Duty 2 (Carentan map) RTX Remix remake — by Tadpole 3159 — remasters almost every asset: ultra‑high‑resolution displacement textures, 3D vegetation, realistic debris, reflective shell casings, and more. Lighting now responds dynamically indoors and outdoors with specular highlights and bounce.
  • Republic Commando's RTX Remix demo (Geonosis prologue) showcases updated PBR textures, emissive glow on Delta squad armor, remodeled weapons and hands, and path‑traced lighting bringing cinematic visual fidelity.
  • Need for Speed Underground sees a gritty remake: punchier contrast, proper shadows, neon‑lit emissive textures, sharper reflections on puddles and cars. Still uses original geometry but looks significantly more lifelike—in motion though, high sampling noise and denoiser artifacts occasionally impact quality.
  • Though still works in progress, all showcased mods demonstrate immense dedication—especially given they're largely solo or small‑team efforts—and represent some of the best RTX Remix community contributions so far.
 
iS rAy-tRaCiNg tHe BiGgEsT sCaM iN gAMiNg?

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I wish Arkham Knight, BioShock or Mirror's Edge RTX from the Nvidia leak eventually see the light of day from Nvidia and their respective publishers, since I'm yet to see any of these old ass games actually benefit in terms of art design from the more sophisticated lighting and materials -- perhaps more modern titles would end up producing aesthetically pleasing results in that regard.
 
This is such a tease though. You'd want the whole thing after seeing how much better some of these are. The winner should be rewarded with a full remake. I'd love to see the remake done.
 
I wish Arkham Knight, BioShock or Mirror's Edge RTX from the Nvidia leak eventually see the light of day from Nvidia and their respective publishers, since I'm yet to see any of these old ass games actually benefit in terms of art design from the more sophisticated lighting and materials -- perhaps more modern titles would end up producing aesthetically pleasing results in that regard.

A lot of older games need it bad. They have good art direction, but awful lighting.
 
iS rAy-tRaCiNg tHe BiGgEsT sCaM iN gAMiNg?
I mean - most of these are a complete art-asset rework, so RT is a footnote rather then the main-thing when it comes to the effort in them.

Also the NFS mod just looks worse in basically every aspect - there are no good choices there - and even at its best it just looks nothing like what was interesting about the original game. Now mind you - I'm not blaming RT for it - but that goes back to the first line.
 
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Call of duty 2 looks so fucking good damn. I love that game.

Also why are these threads always full of Playstation fanboys downplaying RTs advantages?

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Because the consoles are crap at RT. If PS6 ends up solid at RT, it will suddenly become a good thing. You know how it works on here.

Having said that, i myself are not a huge fan of RT. Only because i dont feel the results (usually) are worth the massive performance hit.
 
Nvidia are such dicks for showing off this technology with Morrowind then never speaking of it again.
Mainly because it's not 'technology' so much as 'human effort' that makes it work. Tech is just an enabler, not actually creating the outputs.
For now anyway - I'm sure people are already trying to train AI models to do 'upconversions' automatically and then detractors will have even more grounds to complain about 'soulless' and NVidia even more reason to hype it up.

But hey - we can take bets what game will be the first to get RTXRemixed by AI...
 
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Because the consoles are crap at RT. If PS6 ends up solid at RT, it will suddenly become a good thing. You know how it works on here.

Having said that, i myself are not a huge fan of RT. Only because i dont feel the results (usually) are worth the massive performance hit.
PC are crap at it too. Having to use image reconstruction and fake frames to achieve a semblance of decent experience, I'm a PC player and I hate that smear laggy shit.
 
Windows Defender flagged as a virus one of the RTX Remix compatibility .zip files specifically for Black Mesa and blocked it. I know it's probably not a virus, but who has time to roll the dice with shit like this?
 
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The assets in these two pictures seem to be altered. The lights in the windows, traffic cones, and skybox give it away. Besides that I do not see anything that could not be achieved using high definition textures with occlusion maps and post processing effects. I know I have used ReShade to get similar changes to lighting in a myriad of games.
 
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Wait did I see vampire bloodlines on the website? The day that gets the treatment I will replay day 1. Still waiting on the sequel.

NFS underground... Never played it. That was ps360 era or before? Wonder if on steam?

Edit: it's not on steam.. You can't buy it can you? Wtf ea, of course. Off to the torrent it is.
 
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I'm a big proponent of RT, especially RTGI in games like Doom: The Dark Ages and Assassins Creed Shadows. But these RTX Remix mods continue to look, frankly, like shit.

The juxtaposition of early 2000s geometry and low levels of detail with the ultra realistic lighting continues to look weird to me. It's like when people slap 4K textures on basic 3D models. Just something really off about it. If I look at the Call of Duty 2 shots for example, the lighting is 'better', the assets have even been retouched in places, but the room looks oddly bare and the 'better' graphics actually draw more attention to that. It's almost like the enhancement goes too far but also not far enough.

Not to mention these mods seriously mess with art direction, always making baffling changes like turning an overcast day into a sunset. Ironically, the one game where real RT reflections might've been a benefit - Need for Speed Underground - is missing the iconic street reflections in the after. Bummer.

I prefer playing old games now as closely as I can to how they might've looked back in the day, appreciating the limits the developers had to work with on the hardware at the time.
 
Meanwhile ultra realistic lighting
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In this shot I don't actually think it's the lighting that's the issue, it's the weird use of the materials. Why the modders felt the need to make every metal surface so reflective, and to also add neon glowing tanks of goo (which weren't in the original), is just beyond me. It's a problem that's present in all these RTX Remixes, they are never content just improving the lighting, all the other assets get molested too just because they can be via Remix.

Off-topic: I never cared for Black Mesa's art direction anyway. It looked cheap and nasty even before.
 
50k that has to be split between multiple teams is such a lame reward from a 4.231 trillion dollar company. Make it 10 million dollars and we'll see some really good submissions.
 
PC are crap at it too. Having to use image reconstruction and fake frames to achieve a semblance of decent experience, I'm a PC player and I hate that smear laggy shit.
DLSS is only necessary in PT games. Games with hybrid RT often run well even without DLSS. In some games, RT doesn't affect the framerate at all on powerful GPUs.

I even enable DLSS SR and DLSS FG in raster games to achieve a higher framerate and better image quality (it's difficult to drive a 4K 240Hz screen without DLSS). DLSS often looks better than native TAA, and DLSS FG drastically improves motion clarity, with only minor artefacts that I have to look for to notice.
 
How about Deus Ex The Fall? That's Unity and also dx9.

No idea about it honestly

If its not in the list


Its either it has programmable pipeline and says too new, like deus ex human revolution in that list, or nobody tried to run RTX remix with Deus Ex The fall. I would wager by the time the game released that they made it with programmable shader pipeline but just a gut feeling. A ton of games had DX11 feature set and also legacy DX9 but those games were programmable shader pipeline 100%. It's a very narrow window of games released in DX8 & 9 with fixed function.

Sucks that the pcgamingwiki search query I had before that listed all possible games somehow doesn't work anymore. The Moddb is closest we have.
 
I don't understand this RTX remix concept completely. Are they getting besides Raytracing also new assetts? And who creates these assetts, the modders?
 
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