NVIDIA’s RTX Remix software for remastering classic games with a variety of visual enhancements reached version 1.0 today with some additional big improvements.
NVIDIA RTX Remix provides a platform for remastering classic DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games. RTX Remix in turn depends in part on DXVK for running these old D3D8/D3D9 games atop the Vulkan API.
With today’s RTX Remix 1.0 release on the DXVK side they have added DLSS4 multi-frame generation and transformer model for ray reconstruction. RTX Remix 1.0 also adds support for the Neural Radiance Cache (NRC) as a live-trained AI approach for estimating indirect light more accurately and faster than alternatives.
RTX Remix 1.0 also brings ray-traced sub-surface scattering support for RTX Skin, RTX Volumetrics enhancements, a new texture streaming system with better video memory usage, and a variety of other performance improvements and VRAM usage optimizations.
RTX Remix 1.0 changes include:
DXVK:
– DLSS4: multi-frame frame generation, transformer model for ray reconstruction
– Neural Radiance Cache (NRC): a live-trained AI approach that estimates indirect light more accurately and performantly
– RTX Skin: ray traced subsurface scattering support, using the RTX Character Rendering SDK.
– RTX Volumetrics: higher quality volumetrics with more detailed light shafts. RTX Remix runtime now exposes variables to manipulate atmospheric characteristics, with presets (heavy fog, mist, smoke, etc.)
– Volumetric light intensity multiplier: enables modifying volumetric contribution on a per light basis. (Note that this is not a physically-based parameter and may cause odd visuals if the contribution is biased too far away from the original physical quantity.)
– New Texture streaming system: optimizes VRAM usage to maximize texture quality within the available video memory budget
– USD GeomPointInstancer support: reduces CPU cost for rendering many copies of a replacement mesh. This improves performance when rendering props like grass, where many instances of the same object are typically used.
– Various performance improvements and memory usage optimizations:
+ Optimized memory and performance of BVH builds by utilizing instancing
+ Limited max bones per vertex for skinned meshes
+ Improved OMM budgeting to work better in scenarios using most of VRAM
+ Added runtime normal compression for replacement assets to reduce memory usage
+ Removed unnecessary resource allocations based on active graphics features
+ Disabled rendering passes that are not needed for active graphics features
+ More reuse of compatible resources’ memory across different rendering passes
+ Used VK_BUILD_ACCELERATION_STRUCTURE_LOW_MEMORY_BIT_KHR on lower memory GPUs
+ Tweaked RTXDI quality settings for more performance when RayReconstruction is enabled
+ Switched from host visible to device local allocations for mesh replacement buffers
+ Optimized CPU cost of CreateSurfaceMaterial by caching and reusing RtSurfaceMaterial within the same frame
+ Reused instance matching and projection decomposition to lower per instance CPU cost
– Improved Ray Reconstruction responsiveness with animated textures.
– Remix will now only prewarm shaders that are actually being used, improving shader compilation time at first launch. Note that this may lead to shader compile stalls when changing Remix options that require different shader permutations.
– Added asynchronous shader compilation functionality and a progress UI
– Updated NRD to 4.13 for better performance, sharper and more stable denoising
– animatedWaterTexture now works for translucent materials
– Fixed flickering in reflection & refraction rays that hit the sky
– Fixed incorrectly hidden meshes after hide / show is used in Usd Composer
– Added support for rays starting underwater or inside other translucent materials based on the game’s fog state
– Fixed bugs with terrain and displace_out interactions
– Improved free camera keyboard turning controls
– Added max light intensity for light conversionBridge:
– Corrected an issue where inputs would sometimes not be forwarded.
– Added support for AddDirtyBox(), AddDirtyRect() and SetSoftwareVertexProcessing() API call forwarding.
– Corrected an issue where certain bridge messaging systems ignored that timeouts were disabled, which could cause timeout related crashes if the default value was too low for the host application.
– Corrected an issue where the bridge server or client could hang indefinitely when timeouts are disabled.
Downloads and more details on the NVIDIA RTX Remix 1.0 release via GitHub.
