Roadmap

This is a high-level view into the development pipeline of the RTX Remix team. This is not a commitment of features that will imminently release—instead, it is our best way of letting potential contributors know what problems we are working on and thinking about. Think of it as a snapshot in time of the features we are most interested in solving, as we hope to stay nimble and react to community feedback and development. Check back often!

Features

On deck:

• Open sourcing the Bridge: Any moment now! Thanks for bearing with us… in the meanwhile, the latest Release build contains all the latest Bridge binaries you need to try out the runtime.
• Terrain Blending: Terrain systems using multi-texture blending and vertex color/alpha are common in many games potentially supported by Remix. We’re looking at ways to support terrain rendering better by baking the blended terrain textures together – and then adding material replacement in the mix. This has some connections to skybox support and touches on the topic of more general material support.
• Game Compatibility: Steady stream of bugfixes in progress.
• Anti-culling: Classic games often try to minimize the amount of geometry being drawn outside the immediate view. This is good for performance, but less ideal for path traced content where light can bounce all around the player, and true reflections can reveal parts of the scene previously invisible. We are looking at ways to affect the frustum indirectly in order to trick the games into drawing more geometry. We are also looking at caching previously seen objects.

Backlog – Near Term:

• OpenGL Support: Looking for a preferred OpenGL wrapper, and to then add support for some OpenGL game specific idioms like DrawPrimitiveUP vertex batching.
• Bridge cleanup and performance
• UX improvements for game setup: Improvements to object picking for textures, consolidating texture lists.

Backlog – Longer Term:

• Advanced sky support: Looking at adding HDR sky support and volumetric improvements like finite atmospheric height to better support an infinite sky. Also mulling on the slightly harder topic of importance sampled sky lighting.
• Advanced mod stacking support: Multiple mod loading, enable-disable, application order and Runtime UI support to configure it all.
• Skinned mesh replacement support: Skinning currently works for rendering only, but we can’t replace skinned objects yet. Support for Fixed Function GPU skinning is a more tractable problem and will need export of bones / transforms on capture. Support for CPU or shader-based transforms is trickier and requires investigation.
• Subsurface scattering: In research. Focusing on foliage use cases (“thin-opaque") initially.
• Improved coverage of the fixed-function material in raytracing: Improve visual compatibility with rasterized materials.