Skyrim Kind of Works with NVIDIA’s RTX Remix, Against All Odds

When NVIDIA presented its RTX Remix remastering toolset, it did so by showcasing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, though it also warned that only DX8 and DX9 games with fixed function pipelines would work, which should have made it impossible to run RTX Remix on more recent games like Oblivion and Skyrim.

In case you’re not familiar with fixed function pipelines, they were used when games barely even took advantage of programmable shaders. That means games from the early 2000 decade are the most likely to work with RTX Remix.

However, between the clever modding community and the latest 0.2 RTX Remix release, many games are now somewhat compatible, including Skyrim itself, despite the fact that the game is from late 2011 and was built heavily on shaders. You can watch a couple of brief videos of Skyrim Legendary Edition running on RTX Remix below, captured by Kim2091, who’s also the administrator of the Remix Discord channel.

Kim said setting it up was actually less problematic than with many other games, requiring only to put the most recent compiled builds for dxvk-remix and the RTX Remix bridge in the Skyrim folder. The graphics settings had to be toned to the lowest available preset to minimize the shader interference.

Other than that, Kim had to bypass a texture that created a weird white dome around the player character and fixed some flickering caused by LOD textures, but that’s all it took to get the game working.

Of course, there’s a lot of room for improvement, and Kim shared the hope of collaborating with some of the extremely talented Skyrim modders who would know how to tweak the game’s engine to refine this work-in-progress RTX Remix version.

The RTX Remix community is also working on many other classic PC games, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout: New Vegas (an example video can be found below), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Need for Speed Underground 2, and more.

Once NVIDIA releases the full RTX Remix creation toolkit, modders will have even more ways to remaster these classics with the latest technologies, such as path tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 2/3 upscaling, and more. We’ll continue keeping an eye on the software’s updates and the community’s progress.