Unreal RTX Remix mod lets you play the classic 1998 FPS with full ray tracing

For those who might need a little history lesson, say, if Battlefield 6 was your first foray into the long-running franchise, Epic Games and the studio's Unreal Engine dates back to the seminal 1998 first-person shooter, Unreal. Released at a time when full 3D graphics were relatively new, it elevated PC gaming with some of the most impressive visuals and smooth FPS gameplay that gamers have ever seen.

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At the time, of course, looking back at a PC game that's well over 25 years old means it looks dated when run on a modern PC. This is where NVIDIA's impressive RTX Remix mod tools come in, allowing modders and fans to update classic titles like 1998's Unreal with cutting-edge ray-traced visuals.

UnrealRTX, from modder mstewart401, is an RTX Remix project that has now reached a point where you can play Unreal's entire single-player campaign with path-traced lighting covering everything from global illumination to dynamic shadows, and all of the game's memorable volumetric and emissive light sources.

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Like other RTX Remix projects, this is possible thanks to the tool converting all surfaces to PBR, or physically-based rendered materials. This opens the door to realistic metals, roughness, depth, and modern tech like subsurface scattering, which would have been impossible to pull off in real-time back in 1998. UnrealRTX remains faithful to the look and feel of the original game, so you've got similar chunky polygon models for objects and the environments. However, mstewart401 notes that some of the world's geometry has been updated to "enhance fidelity" with new foliage and textures updated using RTX Remix's AI tools.

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To get the mod up and running, you need to install the classic Unreal Gold disc image (which can be found here), the Unreal 227k_12 Patch from here, and then the UnrealRTX mod from ModDB. It does require a bit of work, but for fans of the classic shooter rocking a modern GeForce RTX graphics card, the result is worth it.