Modder gebdag has released GTA2 RTX Remix, a mod that brings full path tracing and dynamic time-of-day lighting to Grand Theft Auto 2, the 1999 top-down classic. NVIDIA's Jacob Freeman shared a clip of the mod on X, showing a day-night cycle that looks quite well-done. The biggest hurdle was technical, as GTA 2 ran on DirectDraw and an early version of Direct3D, neither of which RTX Remix supports natively.

To get around this, the modder built a custom Direct3D 9 wrapper using two DLLs that translate the game's legacy rendering calls into something RTX Remix can actually read. The result adds real-time path-traced lighting, so explosions, car fires, and neon signs now cast their own glow, and the day-night cycle shifts lighting as it passes. The mod also unlocks widescreen 16:9 support (the original was locked to 4:3) and adds frame generation for up to 60 FPS, well above what the original release could hit.

GTA2 RTX Remix is open source on GitHub and was reportedly tested on version 9.6 of the game, the free release Rockstar distributed in 2004. It needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 alongside the RTX Remix runtime. It's certainly a niche release given how old the base game is, but it's another one in the chain of RTX Remix mods breathing new life into titles most people wrote off years ago.

Similar projects already exist for Max Payne, Morrowind, and Need for Speed Carbon, and modders keep finding new ways to push the tool's limits.