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Gaming·2 min read

GTA 2 RTX Upgraded: a 1999 game gets path tracing

A 27-year-old top-down GTA now has path-traced lighting, reflective cars and glowing night streets, thanks to a modder who got help from Claude Code.

Top-down night street scene from GTA 2 with path-traced neon lights, glossy car reflections and police car lights.
Image: Benchmark.pl
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GTA 2 came out in 1999, and a new mod makes it look like it was built for a graphics card from this year. It is called GTA2 RTX Upgraded, and it adds path tracing to the old top-down crime game just days before GTA 6 arrives.

The work comes from the modding community and relies on NVIDIA RTX Remix, a tool that lets people rework the graphics of older games. It can add advanced lighting, reflections and path tracing, which simulates how light bounces around a scene.

How GTA2 RTX Upgraded came about

The first GTA 2 RTX Remix mod was made by a GitHub user going by gebdag. Later kirrm3la joined in and, with help from Claude Code, took it much further. This was not just prettier lighting. The modder rebuilt materials and textures and changed how the surroundings are rendered.

Cars show the difference most clearly. Their surfaces reflect the environment, windows behave like glass, and the bodywork reacts to light. Police and ambulance lights now illuminate nearby cars and characters. Even pools of blood on the street respond to the new lighting. Night driving looks best, with neon signs, street lamps and headlights casting light that shifts as you move.

How to play GTA 2 with RTX Remix

Setup is fairly simple. You need a copy of the original GTA 2, the RTX Remix files and the GTA2 RTX Upgraded mod itself. You also need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card, since the required technologies depend on it. Once installed, you can switch on path tracing and frame generation, which creates extra frames to smooth out motion.

There is something funny about it. A game made for PCs of nearly three decades ago now runs on tech meant for the newest graphics cards, right before GTA 6 lands.

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Tags:gta 2rtx remixnvidiapath tracingmodclaude code

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