[HN Gopher] Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now ___________________________________________________________________ Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now Author : cbg0 Score : 279 points Date : 2023-04-13 08:00 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nvidia.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nvidia.com) | paulmd wrote: | It's too bad this is a no-go for online/competitive games, which | tbh are a decent number of the DX9 games still worth playing. I'd | love to use this on Team Fortress 2 but I don't want to risk it | on my account with all my items without some kind of explicit | approval, since this hooking/injection probably looks just like a | hack to VAC. | | But path-traced TF2 would own lol. | smoldesu wrote: | It might be fine. If it's just messing with the way DXVK is | being presented, it's not very different from the "hacking" | people use to get DirectX games working on Linux. AFAIK, games | aren't really picky about graphics API calls as long as | everything behaves as-expected. | Bjartr wrote: | Aren't there non-VAC servers you could play on? | amelius wrote: | Perhaps a stupid question, but with all the recent advances in | computer graphics, why do I still see polygons everywhere in | computer games? Is it really that hard to round those corners? | | I think we are optimizing the wrong thing. I think I'm not alone | in wanting round objects more than perfectly ray-traced but | polygonal objects. | drakythe wrote: | Short answer? It depends, but "yes" is more generally going to | be true than not. | | The smoother the edges the more polygons there are. The more | polygons there are the more work the processor has to do to | render them. In a very basic sense. | | Now, it is absolutely possible to round the corners without | incurring heavy processing cost but then you're probably not | going to get good collision, instead you'll get incredibly | obvious clipping (when one seemingly solid object passes | through another without triggering collision). | | So game developers have to make a choice: look good in still | photos or look good in gameplay? (Clipping is a jarring | experience while playing). Bonus benefit: if you do it right | the lower polygon count and less fancy graphic stuff means your | game runs on a wider variety of hardware (smartphones, switch, | Xbox/PlayStation, PC, specialty stuff). | | And that's all not even getting into the cost of paying an | artist to round those corners. Do you balloon your art payroll | and have dozens of artists working on a few hundred "perfect" | assets or would you rather they work on thousands of assets | that are styled consistently and damn the real world | verisimilitude? Games are a passion for many but capitalism | invokes a cost when making them. | amelius wrote: | Ok so instead of paying an artist to round those corners why | not pay them to make round assets, then let the computer | approximate them with polygons when and where appropriate? | midnightclubbed wrote: | There have been attempts to go that route from both the | hardware (eg Nvidia NV1, 1995) and software side (eg Quake | 3 Area, 1999) and many attempts to render curved surfaces | since. Generally triangles have remained dominant because | they are easier to model, easier to manipulate and are | rendered extremely optimally on hardware. | | The approximation to polygons when rendering is a non | trivial task. Individual curved patches can be easily | approximated to triangles but once you connect those | patches together you have to ensure that the tessellated | triangle edges match between neighboring patches. For the | most part it is just easier and more performant to model | with triangles and brute-force render them. One day curved | surfaces may be a better choice but currently triangles are | dominant. | ElectricalUnion wrote: | > pay them to make round assets | | Those require NURBS, Non-uniform rational basis spline, and | (almost) no one does NURBS assets, because it is most of | the time it is a unnecessary pain to use and manipulate | them directly. | zokier wrote: | NURBS is just one way of representing curved surfaces. | Implict surfaces are another promising way of doing | curves, and there are probably others too | ohgodplsno wrote: | A few reasons: | | - "Infinite" detail, like models that would be described by | curves and others are mathematically absurdly expensive. And | when you need your entire frame to be out in 16ms, there really | isn't much space to keep both the advancements _and_ new very | expensive math. It's done for some things like font rendering | (see Slug), but it would be horrible for everything to be done | that way. | | - All of the tooling is still made around triangles and | exporting meshes made out of triangles, because that's how | everyone works. | | - It's how everyone works because your GPU is good at one | thing: triangles. It has dedicated units for that single goal: | take triangles, and rasterize them to the screen. So, even if | you made a brand new GPU with a Bezier Engine :tm: in there to | make it efficient... well you still have to support all of the | GPUs that only know how to do triangles, and you're back to | doing math to transform these into triangles. | | - Even if you do that, surprise, your screens don't do curves | either, nor do your framebuffers! They're a bunch of pixels, so | you just transferred your aliasing problems from "triangles | along a grid don't look good" to "you need to match your curve | to your grid", and if your detail becomes small enough, you now | also have aliasing there. | | - There's nothing that we have in this world that is round and | we can't do a convincing job of with triangles. Sure, maybe | something that has absurd scale, like a planet you can both see | from outer space and up close: that'd be a lot of triangles to | make it look smooth at all angles. It would be kind of | performance wasting, but you can do it. And techniques like | Nanite would actually even fix the problem a little bit. | zokier wrote: | Its not that absurdly expensive. Something like this renders | at interactive rates on webgl: | https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4tByz3 | TechSquidTV wrote: | Pretty much Eunreal Engine 5 is going to completelyt fix this, | but it's pretty new. Other engine's will pick up the same | techniques. In 5ish years, this problem will be long gone. | artificial wrote: | Nanite forest biome, simply gorgeous! You can pull in Houdini | to procedurally generate a host of things inside UE. | https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en- | US/product/redwo... | jayd16 wrote: | There really hasn't been great automatic mesh detail scaling | techniques outside of tesselation shaders and they're not super | easy for an artist to work with. | | Unreal 5's Nanite system is a big step up but it's brand new | and unique. Not many games are out yet and no other big engines | have a competitor technology. | brylie wrote: | In short, it's about the trade-off between quality and | performance. Also, not all corners need to be round. | | The following article provides an in-depth exploration of how | polygon count affects performance. | | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/polycount-understanding-model... | [deleted] | outworlder wrote: | > Is it really that hard to round those corners? | | Yes. | | They are unlikely to ever be 'round'. Perhaps when the entire | scene, and not just reflections is rendered by raytracers. That | way one can represent mathematically correct curves. At that | point we'll basically be throwing away all advancements in GPU | tech. | | Besides, it's utterly unnecessary when we can fake roundness by | increasing the number of polygons and by clever illumination. | [deleted] | epolanski wrote: | Remix has been available from quite some time. | | Anything interesting has been released with it? Any mod. | | I haven't heard/seen anything. | erk__ wrote: | The most well known example is probably the Portal mod | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZHBl5yWqJk | hbn wrote: | I'm pretty sure that's the only example because it's made by | Nvidia themselves as a showcase for this tech because they | were the only ones with access to it until today. | | i.e. it hasn't been available until today. | jjbinx007 wrote: | I found it to be very impressive, although eventually it | caused a few performance stutters on my laptop after extended | playing. | | What a shame it can only be used on older DX 7 and 8 games. | christkv wrote: | I think it's DX8 and 9 not sure about 7. | scandinavian wrote: | It has not been available, it was just released, hence the news | being submitted here. Before this the only way to use it was to | just take the dll from Portal RTX and try to throw it at old | games hoping it would work. | robertkrahn01 wrote: | From the workflow shown in the video it might even make sense to | build a low-res game now with DirectX 9 and "mod it up"? The | texture upscaling and material inference as well as the direct | modification capabilities look amazing! | jayd16 wrote: | I don't think I'd go that far, haha. Building a good looking | low res texture is probably harder than getting a nice modern | one. | aceazzameen wrote: | This is amazing! Is it also possible to add animation or effects | to objects/characters that didn't previously exist? Or update | existing ones? | rasz wrote: | >Because Remix is build on Nvidia OnlyVerse | | hehe | | Someone at Nvidia of all places uploads YT video with gameplay | footage at 1080 30fps with bad frame pacing and stuttering. | | Cool technology. Dont know what game publishers are going to say | about it, Rockstar sued for less. | amrb wrote: | I could see Nvidia licensing the tech to game publishers but | they didn't get much uptake, so open source it is. | christkv wrote: | Seems like it would have to work on AMD and Intel as well for | it to be a viable path. | amrb wrote: | We have seen hair works as a Nvidia only tech.. Compatibly | could be why the licence theory was rejected. | petermcneeley wrote: | What was the previous suit by rockstar. I have seen suits where | people were selling mods that circumvented DRM. | [deleted] | sintax wrote: | Looks like it's based on DXVK from | https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk | cube2222 wrote: | How does something like this work? | | Don't most of these games have custom code for rendering and | lighting? How is this able to fit into that custom code | automatically? | | Or is the automation here very limited and you just have to | reverse engineer these and find the right hookpoints, while this | project just provides the code that you can hook into the games? | [deleted] | dev_snd wrote: | This is the reason it only works with directx 8 or 9: they have | a pretty rigid render path with a clearly separated vertex and | pixel shader pipeline. | | For directx 8, you would for example specify light sources as | part of special draw calls to the directx API, which makes it | easier to translate them to a ray traced scene graph. | | Shader tools like reshare also use heuristics to detect which | of the framebuffers contains a depth map to add effects like | SSAO to older games. | | I imagine that rtx remix can to similar things to detect where | in a shader the light coordinates are stored: after all most | shaders look pretty similar when it comes to implementing a | Phong shader etc. | qikInNdOutReply wrote: | For everything over it, nvidia would have to expose the | byzantine monstrosity that is the drivers they wrote, that | detect games and hotswap the buggy developer shadercode out | for working nvidia shader code. And they could do that for | older titles. It just wouldnt be neat. | l33tman wrote: | It hooks into the DirectX fixed-function pipeline used back in | the day (i.e. where you set up model/view/projection matrices | and lightsource coordinates and surface materials and sent to | OpenGL/Direct3D), so it knows what the programmer wanted to do, | and from there it's "easy" to replace everything. | | Excerpt: "Scene manager, which uses information coming through | the D3D9 fixed function API to create a representation of the | original scene, track game objects frame to frame, and set up | the scene to be path traced." | prettyStandard wrote: | So we should expect some builds for Steam & Proton? | ptato wrote: | For Morrowind it didn't just upgrade the rendering, it completely | changed the aesthetic of the scene. Is that on purpose? At that | point you can't call the results better, only different. | bee_rider wrote: | It is true that it changes the aesthetic a bit, and it is a | change rather than a straight upgrade. | | But the old rendering pipeline still exists I guess, and the | new one look wicked cool. | Arrath wrote: | It seems you'd certainly be able to go in and just tweak the | lighting without doing all the AI touchups, texture upscaling, | and model swaps as they did in the video. Pretty wild stuff, | either way. | mordae wrote: | It ended up looking similar to Oblivion. So I'd wager a guess | that it was the intended aesthetic, only limited by the older | technology. | | The only authority here would be the original designers. | jandrese wrote: | It seems like the big change is that the light sources now | actually emit light so the scene becomes a lot brighter. Maybe | part of the process should be turning down global illumination? | That might make dark corners even more dark however, and | "hidden" clues that were supposed to be difficult to see may | become outright invisible. | FloatArtifact wrote: | It's a shame that this isn't GPU agnostic. | jsheard wrote: | It is technically GPU agnostic, the injected renderer should | run on any hardware that supports Vulkan raytracing. The design | of the renderer certainly plays to the strengths of Nvidia's | architectures though, so performance is quite bad on AMD cards. | wing-_-nuts wrote: | performance is terrible on just about everything. even a 4090 | doesn't get above 30 fps on rtx portal without dlss helping | out at 4k. A 4090! | | Honestly, this seems to be nvidia's way of making everything | look _slightly_ better while requiring _massively_ stronger | hardware. It feels like this was purposely done to | disadvantage amd and intel | sigstoat wrote: | > even a 4090 doesn't get above 30 fps on rtx portal | without dlss helping out at 4k. A 4090! | | hmm, yeah, i just tried turning off DLSS on a 3080. that | went very poorly. | | > It feels like this was purposely done to disadvantage amd | and intel | | they're competitors? "have some free stuff, p.s. we only | spent time optimizing it for things we sell" seems pretty | ok to me. | nix0n wrote: | > "have some free stuff, p.s. we only spent time | optimizing it for things we sell" | | The funny part is, that's exactly what Intel did with | their C++ compiler. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler | ChoGGi wrote: | What better way to sell expensive hardware? | nanidin wrote: | Support cryptocurrency developers that commit to GPU only | proof of work schemes for X years. Pump the price of said | cryptocurrency. | danudey wrote: | For only $1500 USD you can have the prettiest version of | Portal at framerates we haven't seen in fifteen years! | shados wrote: | > at framerates we haven't seen in fifteen years | | Now now, lets not forget consoles exist. | wing-_-nuts wrote: | The PS5 runs most games at 4k 60. Granted, it's scaled on | some games, but that _really_ doesn 't matter when it's | being outputted to a TV sitting 10 feet or more away from | the viewer. | | I get _why_ they did what they did, because most TVs now | days are 4k, but if you know enough about the limits of | human vision, it 's pretty clear that 4k is a waste for | console gaming. It makes much more sense on PC, but even | there the biggest noticeable difference is reading text, | not playing games. | hbn wrote: | It was only this latest generation of consoles that | started giving a shit about framerates again because they | basically hit diminishing returns on pumping more | triangles into every mole of every NPC, and resolutions | were good enough at 4k, so framerates were suddenly | something important enough to care about. | | But the PS4/Xbone/Switch and prior 3D consoles certainly | treated 30fps (sometimes less) as a standard in most | cases. There's a reason people want to get Bloodborne | ported somewhere else, because currently the only way to | play it (PS4) is locked at 30fps. | taf2 wrote: | It's opened now so perhaps another graphics company will invest | the time to make that happen? | prettyStandard wrote: | Is Nvidia making good on its promise to Open Source it's drivers | a d stuff? They may not give us everything but this must be the | third or fourth announcement from Nvidia on some open source they | are providing I have seen in the past year or so. | kkielhofner wrote: | Nvidia really hurt themselves with their long-standing closed | source driver position. In many circles (like HN) they burned a | lot of goodwill and mindshare because of their driver stance | and effect it has had on Linux desktop users. It is an | extremely tiny population (in terms of numbers) BUT those users | (like the HN users) have an outsized impact due to the tendency | for them to be in technical and decision making positions. | | However, Nvidia (other than the driver) has a TON of open | source work. In addition to contributions all over the place in | the relevant open source ecosystems/projects they have 349 | repos on Github[0]. They also have a variety of different | organizations on Github (for some reason) like Triton Inference | Server that has another 30 repos[1]. If you start wandering | through these repos these aren't small efforts either - it's | clear Nvidia puts a TON of resources and investment in open | source. | | At the risk of making this another Nvidia vs AMD thread, AMD | (the open source desktop darling) by comparison has 39 repos on | Github[2]. Their entire project for ML has a total of another | 39 repos[3]. | | If it weren't for the proprietary closed-source desktop driver | souring people it would be clear and obvious how much of a | supporter of open source Nvidia is. | | [0] - https://github.com/NVIDIA | | [1] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server | | [2] - https://github.com/amd | | [3] - https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute | nazgulsenpai wrote: | NVIDIA open sourcing lots of non-graphic driver codebases | doesn't excuse them from open-sourcing their graphic drivers. | It's simple really. | the8472 wrote: | They did[0], for GPU models where they moved all the | proprietary parts into the firmware. | | [0] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules#user- | conte... | kkielhofner wrote: | I'm not saying it does. | | Your comment is exactly what I'm talking about "Nvidia has | millions of lines of open source" "Yeah but their driver | though - they hate open source and I hate them". It's not | that simple. | nazgulsenpai wrote: | I never said they hate open source or that I hate them. I | just don't care how much open source they do if the the | driver for only product that matters to me isn't open | source. Their competitors' drivers are so it makes my | decision easy. | | I'm not sure why it would bother anyone else that I find | their lack of open source graphic drivers problematic. | paulmd wrote: | AMDGPU-pro is closed and there's a lot of features like | raytracing that don't work on the open version at all. | HDMI 2.1 doesn't work on either open or closed versions | afaik (there is a long-running ticket complaining about | it). And they also still have blobs too despite all that. | | https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 | | https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/ | lin... | | Nobody's drivers are totally open, if you use HDMI then | you aren't allowed to be fully open because HDMI Forum | won't let you, that's the brightline. You have to have | some blobs to deal with them and similar ultimatums from | other vendors. | | If you are ok with _something_ working, as long as it 's | open, and major features being broken doesn't bother | you... might I suggest nouveau? AFAIK NVIDIA has even | started addressing the reclocking issue on the newer | gens. | nazgulsenpai wrote: | I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make | here. I didn't suggest the entire stack has to be open | source, nor am I looking for a reason to use NVIDIA on | Linux. I just think it would be great if NVIDIA open | sourced whatever portions of their graphics driver to | make the Mesa implementation competitive. | kimixa wrote: | Counting github repos is too dependent on how projects or | organized to be anywhere near a useful metric - especially as | one of the major advantages of open source is integration to | the corresponding open source projects, like the linux kernel | and mesa, which aren't under AMD's github. | | And even then that count misses a large number of projects, | like things under OpenGPU (https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers | and https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs) for example. | | It is in NVidia's best interest to foster the ecosystem | around their closed system after all, so long as it's all | built upon a foundation they control (Their closed source | driver, and proprietary interfaces like CUDA). Nobody thought | '90s microsoft was an open source beacon, yet they "gave | away" a large amount of code - mainly win32 examples and the | like. | | For someone who claims to be trying to avoid some "Which | corporation that doesn't know you exist is the best" fight | you have chosen a rather specific unbalanced comparison. | bsder wrote: | > Counting github repos is too dependent on how projects or | organized to be anywhere near a useful metric | | Agreed. Nvidia have a lot of _abandoned_ Github repos where | they dumped code and ran away. This lets them obey the | letter of the law and release code without anybody being | able to make use of it. | kkielhofner wrote: | Not sure why or how this is a "fight" other than (as stated | in my first comment) it's one of the more ridiculous | religious wars that seems to erupt on HN for reasons I'll | never understand. | | I'm not going to do a full LoC analysis for an HN comment | or analyze recent commits. It was a sixty second way to say | "Nvidia has a lot of open source and the reductive HN | take/experience from Linux desktop users solely based on | their experience with drivers is a tiny piece of the | picture". | | That said I would bet a dinner that a full analysis of | Nvidia open source vs anyone else in the field would favor | Nvidia handily. | kimixa wrote: | > That said I would bet a dinner that a full analysis of | Nvidia open source vs anyone else in the field would | favor Nvidia handily. | | It feels a bit weird to agree that any attempt at | comparing is silly, and even agreeing on how to compare | impossible to define, immediately followed by "But I bet | I'd win anyway". | pjmlp wrote: | It is doing just fine in Hollywood, CAD folks and GPGPU. | | Many companies would dream to hurt themselves that bad. | royjacobs wrote: | This is such a good way to make these old games look really | spectacular. 2d graphics of the era haven't aged particularly | badly but old 3d games usually look pretty janky (imo!). Being | able to literally see them in a new light is wonderful. | zokier wrote: | There is increasing newfound appreciation for that early 3d | visual look though. You can see that in new games being clearly | inspired by that look, for example Dusk (with "overwhelmingly | positive" rating): | https://store.steampowered.com/app/519860/DUSK/ | Arrath wrote: | Maybe I spent far too much time playing Morrowind, but that | place just feels homey. Low poly models and muddy textures and | all. | officeplant wrote: | I love it, but projects like OpenMorrowind and Daggerfall | Unity have given me new appreciation for the older games I | struggled with as a kid. | hbn wrote: | I also feel like cranking up the quality of scenes like this | is just gonna make it more jarring when you talk to an NPC, | the world freezes, and their cold, dead eyes stare into your | soul as their mouth awkwardly wiggles around and corny voice | acting is played at you. | anthk wrote: | This would work great on the first Max Payne. Now if Havok was | under a libre license... (or a Max Payne engine reimplementation | a la re3/openrw). | amrb wrote: | feel more likely to rip game assets and build in a supported | engine like Unreal. | v7n wrote: | MP 1 & 2 remakes are in the works by Remedy | | https://www.remedygames.com/games/max-payne-remake/ | henriquecm8 wrote: | I played Max Payne recently, and didn't find a way to fix the | audio problems, other than that it runs great. | anthk wrote: | https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne#Missing_audio | panki27 wrote: | According to the user guide [0], it's as simple as dragging the | provided DLL into the game folder. I'm going to try this out with | one of my old favorites today, I doubt it'll be quite this easy. | | [0] https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/wiki/runtime- | us... | amrb wrote: | The of the widescreen fixes for the Unreal games was the | addition of a dll file in the game folder. | moron4hire wrote: | I believe the DLL alone only makes the game moddable. | Thereafter, there's still a lot of work to do to swap out low | resolution and poly-count assets for more detailed ones. | capableweb wrote: | The video seems to hint that some of the process of upgrading | models can be done automatically with AI-assisted tooling. | moron4hire wrote: | Yeah, but not live at runtime. It's still a pre-process | that needs to be applied per game. Maybe just dropping the | DLL into the game folder will upgrade the lighting | automatically, in the rare cases these older games used | real-time lighting. But real-time lighting, as far as I | remember, was a pretty rare technique, opting instead to | bake lighting into textures during asset compilation. | jsheard wrote: | The graphical tool shown for swapping out assets also isn't | available yet, though it's supposed to be coming "soon". | boywitharupee wrote: | Would this work for counterstrike 1.6 or halflife? | panki27 wrote: | I loaded up HL2 with this, it's the only game I've tested so | far that actually loads the DLL correctly. I can toogle the | overlay menu and I've gotten one of the menu screens to look | somewhat OK. After loading into Route Canal or Sandtraps, | it's pitch black, aside from the weapon and the buggy. Spent | like half an hour messing with the settings but I couldn't | get it to work well. | | NFS:U2 and GTA:SA do not start at all with the DLL present. | danielrpa wrote: | There we go pay for Skyrim again... | andrewstuart wrote: | You too? | MikusR wrote: | Doesn't work for Skyrim. Only old games | flangola7 wrote: | Skyrim is super old | MikusR wrote: | Not old enough | ohgodplsno wrote: | Special Edition will not work, but release Skyrim is a DX9 | game, it will work. | MikusR wrote: | Skyrim is shader based so rtx remix won't work. | PufPufPuf wrote: | 2011 was 12 years ago | zokier wrote: | Remix seems to be targeting roughly 2000-2005 era games, so | decade older than Skyrim. Even Oblivion might be too modern | for it. | [deleted] | ralmidani wrote: | Will it run on Crysis? | willis936 wrote: | Crysis has a DX9 mode, so maybe. | callesgg wrote: | The crysis dx9 mode does most likely not use the dx9 fixed | pipeline. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-13 23:00 UTC)