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GTA VI launches on

Top-down view of a GTA 2 avenue with two burning cars lighting up the asphalt, traffic and realistic shadows, with path tracing.

GTA 2 gets full path tracing 27 years later thanks to RTX Remix

A mod brings 1999’s GTA 2 to RTX Remix: real light from explosions and gunfire, a day-night cycle, true widescreen and 60 fps. What it offers and what you need.

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Path tracing has reached the top-down GTAs. On September 23, 2026, modder gebdag released GTA2 RTX Remix, a mod that lets you play GTA 2, DMA Design's 1999 classic, with NVIDIA's RTX Remix lighting. Two days later, NVIDIA's Jacob Freeman shared it on social media, and it went viral.

How it works

RTX Remix is built for games running on DirectX 8 and 9, but GTA 2 uses DirectDraw and a very early version of Direct3D, so it wasn't compatible. The fix was to write a new Direct3D 9 renderer for the game, delivered as two DLLs that replace the originals. With that in place, RTX Remix can "see" the scene and simulate light the way it behaves in reality.

An Anywhere City intersection seen from above, with crosswalks, cars and long building shadows at sunset, in GTA 2 with RTX Remix.

What it offers

  • Full path tracing, with the game's lights translated and new lights generated by explosions, fires and gunfire.
  • A dynamic day-night cycle, via the community's Remix Plus build.
  • Emissive textures: signs and objects that glow and light their surroundings.
  • Animated water with a visible sandy riverbed beneath the surface.
  • Proper 16:9 widescreen: cars and pedestrians no longer pop in at the sides of the screen.
  • Up to 60 fps with frame generation.
  • An F4 settings panel for adjusting lighting and time of day.
A GTA 2 interior bathed in intense red neon light, with the rest of the scene in shadow, thanks to path tracing.

Updates

The mod was updated several times in its first week. Version 0.7.0 (September 24) added flickering lights to burning cars and made every pickup glow so it's visible in the dark; 0.8.1 (September 30) fixed broken transparent textures and introduced a new water texture.

What you'll need

The mod doesn't include the game. It works with GTA 2 for PC, tested on version 9.6, the release Rockstar gave away in December 2004 as part of its classics collection, though 11.44 should work too. You'll also need the RTX Remix runtime, 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 and an RTX card with enough muscle for path tracing. GTA House doesn't link to downloads.

Our take

This is one of those projects that sounds like a whim and turns out beautiful: GTA 2's city, always flat and a little drab, gains real depth from shadows, water and the light of every explosion. It joins a path tracing wave that has already reached GTA IV, and it shows how much the community still cares about the oldest GTAs, even ones Rockstar was giving away for free twenty years ago.