Portal with RTX brings full path-tracing to Valve’s iconic release from 2007, remastering the game using the most advanced technology available to developers today. Full path-tracing means every light, shadow, reflection, and object you see is being rendered using cutting-edge ray-tracing technology. The results are stunning, but Portal with RTX is a lot more than a fancy mod created to showcase the latest in gaming hardware. It also marks the debut of a new technology called RTX Remix. - a fascinating tool for creators that can be used to mod just about any game.

Powered by NVIDIA’s Omniverse, RTX hardware, and AI, it can effectively take any scene from a DirectX 8 or DirectX 9 rendered game, and provide access to replace assets, update models, use AI to enhance visuals, and even add real-time ray-tracing with relative ease. When NVIDIA announced its new GeForce RTX 40 Series earlier this year, with the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 at the helm, it showcased the capabilities of RTX Remix in a video that looked a lot more like strange tech sorcery than actual game development.

We got to see Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with ray-tracing and AI-enhanced textures. We got to see Portal with RTX.

RTX Remix isn’t a replacement for traditional development, but a forward-thinking tool to help creators bring their ideas to life. Take any high-profile mod currently in development, and creators are collaborating from all corners of the globe. RTX Remix presents a platform, in the Omniverse, where AI, software, hardware, and artistry comes together.

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RTX Remix isn’t a replacement for traditional development, but a forward-thinking tool to help creators bring their ideas to life.

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NVIDIA’s own internal Lightspeed Studios has done its best to showcase exactly what’s possible with the release of Portal with RTX, where fully path-traced lighting, new textures, and updated models add a new level of immersion to the classic puzzle game. More of a visual overhaul than a transformative mod, the goal of RTX Remix, in the long run, is to help foster the latter. To create brand-new worlds.

Ahead of the launch of the GeForce RTX 40 Series, we had the chance to chat with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang about RTX Remix, and what it means for the modding community and game development going forward.

“RTX Remix was really understated in how we launched it,” Jensen Huang tells me. “Let me relaunch it. I believe the next generation of games is about user-generated content. I believe that it's about user-generated worlds that are heavily modified from the original creation. All of these amazing games started out their lives as mods for a good reason. Nine out of the ten most popular games today started out as mods for a good reason. And the reason for that is that there's so much creativity around the world. Everybody's a creator.”

“And so we created a platform, from the single most powerful platform that we know of today from a technology perspective called Omniverse,” Jensen Huang continues. “That made it possible for us to infuse several things. Of course, real-time ray tracing, real-time physics, but more importantly, artificial intelligence. Look at all of the AI work that we’re doing, all of that's going to be available in Omniverse, and all of it's going to be available in RTX Remix.”

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"Real-time ray tracing, real-time physics, but more importantly, artificial intelligence. Look at all of the AI work that we’re doing, all of that's going to be available in Omniverse, and all of it's going to be available in RTX Remix."

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“Gamers can start from somebody's world and modify that and create other games from that. And that spawns, if you will, the multiverse. You're basically going to have the metaverse and multiverses, and they're parallel universes, and they're derived from the same laws of physics and the same basic worlds. But they’ve spun off in all these different directions, and they're user-directed, they're community directed. And so this concept of the multiverse is really going to happen, and we need to give it an engine to make that possible. We call it RTX Remix, but in the long term, it's likely just going to be called Omniverse.”

“We created a shell, we've created a framework around Omniverse so that it's easier to import game assets,” Jensen Huang concludes. “And we’ve made it easier to then download the modded game.”