New studio founded by Nvidia to bring ray tracing to more classics

A new finding by DSOGaming sheds light on Nvidia’s new ambitions to create more remasters of PC classic titles by adding ray tracing to them. The fancy new graphics technology has just become viable for consumer games to be handled in real-time thanks to Nvidia’s very own RTX technique.

Nvidia fell into the undesirable spot this console generation when not only one but the two major home console makers Sony and Microsoft decided to go with its direct competitor AMD. Not only are the PS4 & Xbox One powered by AMD silicon but the two companies future systems are also sporting AMD tech. Nvidia has managed to deliver the chip for the Nintendo Switch however.

On the PC front, things are drastically different with AMD trailing massively behind Nvidia. Team Green has for a long time pioneered new features and technology on the PC with real-time ray tracing being the most recent one, dubbed RTX. As a very cutting-edge technology, the new Nvidia GPUs ended up costing more than their predecessors and naturally, RTX has yet to set the world on fire. Not many games are making use of the performance-heavy feature.

NVIDIA is kicking off an exciting new game remastering program. We’re cherry-picking some of the greatest titles from the past decades and bringing them into the ray tracing age, giving them state-of-the-art visuals while keeping the gameplay that made them great. The NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios team is picking up the challenge starting with a title that you know and love but we can’t talk about here! We’re building a team of talented, dedicated game developers who are ready to get going quickly. – Nvidia

Seeing that, Nvidia has started their own initiative to bring RTX ray tracing to more games. The newly established Nvidia Lightspeed Studios is currently hiring and the official job posting gives plenty clues about what types of games we can expect. Just like Nvidia’s Quake II RTX, Lightspeed Studios aims to remaster classic PC titles with ray tracing. There are no mentions about which specific games they plan to remaster but it’s fair to assume that it will be widely-acclaimed popular games from yesteryear.

There’s obviously no release timeframe at this point but we expect 2020 to have some nice RTX-enhanced classics in store. But with the future PlayStation and Xbox consoles supporting ray tracing on a silicon level, these remasters could very well make their way on next-gen systems, too.