Left 4 Dead 2 Gets RTX Mod, Promptly Dies
Left 4 Dead 2, the popular co-op action horror game from Valve, recently received a community-made mod that lets players use new RTX tech by NVIDIA to improve graphics. However, it’s also been found to cause serious frame-rate issues that can render the game more of a good-looking walking corpse than a fast-paced zombie shooter.
Left 4 Dead 2 – RTX Remix Compatibility Mod is available online for free, is created by user xoxor4d, and uses NVIDA’s RTX Remix. The latter mod allows for older games to be remastered using AI. To xoxor4d’s credit, however, they do make it clear that their mod is not a remaster.
“RTX Remix was never intended to support this game so expect stuff to be broken.
This is not trying to be a remaster. It simply makes the game compatible with RTX Remix. Please keep that in mind,” the developer said on the mod’s GitHub page.
L4D2 RTX Remix
NVIDIA’s RTX Remix is specifically geared towards games that run on DirectX 8 or 9, and works by creating lights and adding remastered assets into a game. It does this by capturing classic game scenes, injecting the remastered assets back in during playback, and relighting everything with path tracing.
The Left 4 Dead 2 RTX Remix mod uses a similar pipeline but since L4D2 is 16 years old, it has a bit of trouble remixing assets. As xoxor4d on the mod’s official GitHub page said:
“The compatibility mod itself does not enhance any assets and only handles a few lights and as such, might even look worse than the original game. This will however change when community made mods with proper enhanced assets and proper lighting get available.”
It’s Not All Bad News
Left 4 Dead 2 – RTX Remix Compatibility Mod shouldn’t be completely written off, however. Test videos, such as one made by MxBenchmarkPC with 32,000 views on YouTube, highlight the difference between the game with and without the mod activated. It’s clear the uptick in graphical quality is impressive, even if the frame-rate typically drops from around 500 to 50.
User comments under the video include “I think some of the textures need updating to accommodate the new visuals but it looks great, performance isn’t great though,” and “It’s funny how people expect path tracing not be demanding, when it actually calculates all the stuff that might reflect shadow or bounce the lighting of stuff naturally.”
A full campaign gameplay video by RTX Simplicity, a tech-focused channel with 12.5K subscribers on YouTube, showed that the framerate drop doesn’t really affect gameplay itself, with users commenting on how nicely the dark interiors light up with flashlights.
Both of these test videos also note that, of course, if a player has a high-spec gaming rig then they’re unlikely to encounter any issues that render the game unplayable with the mod.