GTA 2 gets full path tracing 27 years after launch with Nvidia RTX Remix mod

GTA 6 is only a few weeks away from its November 19 launch, but one modder has gone back 27 years to give the series’ top-down era a modern lighting overhaul. A developer who goes by gebdag has added full path tracing to GTA 2, Rockstar’s 1999 crime game. Published on GitHub, the mod uses Nvidia’s RTX Remix to replace the game’s original lighting with path-traced illumination, a technique that simulates how light travels and bounces through a scene.

Nvidia’s Jacob Freeman shared a clip of the project, called GTA2 RTX Remix, on X on September 25. 

Fires, explosions, and gunfire now cast dynamic light across the city, and vehicle lights and neon signs illuminate the streets around them. Some textures use emissive maps, which let objects and light sources glow instead of relying on the game’s original rendering. The mod also adds a dynamic time-of-day cycle through Remix Plus, a community-built version of the RTX Remix runtime, and the lighting changes are most visible at night.

GTA 2 originally ran at a 4:3 aspect ratio. The mod fixes the 16:9 display, which stops cars and pedestrians from popping into view at the edges of the screen. It can reach 60fps with frame generation enabled, and pressing F4 opens a settings panel for adjusting the lighting and time of day.

RTX Remix is designed for games built on DirectX 8 and 9, while GTA 2 uses DirectDraw and an early version of Direct3D. To bridge the gap, gebdag built a custom Direct3D 9 wrapper made up of two DLL files that translate the game’s legacy rendering calls into a form RTX Remix can read. RTX Remix then places its runtime files next to the game’s executable and swaps the original rendering path for its own path-traced renderer.

GTA2 RTX Remix is a mod rather than a standalone release, so players need a working copy of the original game and must install the mod files alongside it. Gebdag built and tested the mod against version 9.6 of GTA 2, the freeware release Rockstar made available on PC in December 2004; however, Remix Plus 1.5.1 is recommended for the day-night cycle and correct HUD display.

GTA 2 joins a growing list of older PC games reworked with RTX Remix as path tracing mods already exist for Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Grand Theft Auto IV and Serious Sam.