NVIDIA RTX Remix Community is a group of game developers remastering popular games from the past. "Quake II RTX" and "Portal with RTX" were extremely well received, and the community now turned its sights to a cult classic—Half-Life 2. When it came out in 2004 (that's 19 years ago!), Half-Life 2 already set standards for realism, and invented several new gameplay mechanics. It is believed to have edged past "Doom 3" in art direction and production quality for the time; and now the RTX Remix Community is inviting game modders to join the effort at this page.

Four of HL2's top modding teams, known as Orbfold Studios, is leading the effort within the community, at remastering the entire game—an effort on a much larger scale than "Portal." The remaster will include full ray tracing effects, support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, RTX-IO, and modernized assets (higher resolution textures, higher poly-count models, with support for modern surfaces and geometry. The teaser from NVIDIA includes a picture of the HEV Suit from the game, and a scene from the game showing just how much more advanced the game is shaping up to be! The company didn't announce any timeline to go with Half-Life 2 RTX, since it is still in development.

NVIDIA dusted off its RTX-IO technology moniker which we thought it retired in the wake of the now-standardized DirectStorage API, in an attempt to bring its benefits to games powered by the Vulkan API. Team Green was the first to introduce such a technology to the PC platform, something functionally-similar existed with game consoles, where it plays a key role in speeding up game loading times. DirectStorage enables a means for the GPU to directly communicate with a storage device, with no round-trips to the CPU cores or main memory. This enables a quicker way for a game to transfer its assets to the video memory. NVIDIA introduces this as part of its latest GeForce 526.98 WHQL drivers. The same drivers also introduce official DirectStorage 1.1 support.

With DirectStorage 1.1, Microsoft went a step ahead and introduced GPU-accelerated game asset decompression. Game assets (such as textures) are stored on your disk in compressed form, and are decompressed as needed when your game loads. This involves the CPU cores, and tends to be slower when compared to getting the same job done by a GPU when not rendering 3D graphics. NVIDIA even developed a file-compression format optimized for highly-parallelized decompression hardware such as GPUs. The standardization by Microsoft extends this feature to other brands of GPUs (such as AMD and Intel, which are confirmed to be implementing it); but games powered by the Vulkan API were left out in the lurch. NVIDIA developed a Vulkan version of the original RTX-IO tech (which would go on to develop into DirectStorage), so now game developers with engines primarily designed for Vulkan (such as idTech), can speed up game load times.