Grand Theft Auto 2 has somehow entered its ray-tracing era. Yes, the 1999 top-down chaos simulator.
While everyone is still waiting for Grand Theft Auto VI, modder gebdag has pushed one of Rockstar’s older classics into modern PC graphics territory with GTA2 RTX Remix — an open-source mod that brings full path tracing, dynamic time-of-day lighting and other modern display upgrades to the 27-year-old game.
The cool part is not just “old game looks shiny now”. The technical bit is genuinely interesting: GTA 2 was built around much older graphics tech, including DirectDraw and early Direct3D. Nvidia’s RTX Remix does not natively support DirectDraw and is mainly designed to work with Direct3D 9, so the game needed a bridge before RTX Remix could understand what it was rendering.
That bridge is the mod’s custom Direct3D 9 renderer.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the mod uses two DLL files — gta2dx9.dll and gta2dx9_vid.dll — to translate GTA 2’s old graphics pipeline into something RTX Remix can process. Once that translation layer is in place, RTX Remix can apply modern lighting work in real time.
The result: Anywhere City gets a proper visual upgrade without changing the core top-down GTA 2 feel. Lighting and shadows are now more dramatic, the city can shift through a dynamic day-night cycle, and light sources like explosions, burning vehicles and neon signs now produce glow and reflections. Players can also press F4 to access a menu and adjust lighting settings.
Beyond the path-traced eye candy, GTA2 RTX Remix also adds some very practical quality-of-life improvements. The original game was built around a 4:3 display format, but this mod supports 16:9 widescreen. It also supports up to 60 FPS through Frame Generation technology and addresses the old issue where cars and pedestrians would appear suddenly at the edges of the screen.
To run it, players need a copy of Grand Theft Auto 2. The modder specifically tested it with version 9.6, the version Rockstar Games distributed for free back in 2004. A 64-bit Windows 10 or Windows 11 setup is also required, along with the necessary RTX Remix runtime files.
Why this matters for Malaysia and SEA readers — analysis
For Malaysia and SEA PC gamers, the bigger story here is not that GTA 2 suddenly looks “next-gen”. It is that community modding is keeping old PC games playable, tweakable and visually relevant long after their original tech stack became ancient.
A lot of classic PC games from the late 90s and early 2000s were built for APIs, screen ratios and hardware assumptions that do not fit modern systems nicely anymore. Mods like this show how wrappers, open-source work and tools like RTX Remix can give those games a second life without waiting for an official remaster.
That matters because retro PC gaming is not only nostalgia; it is preservation. When old games can be adapted to modern Windows systems, widescreen monitors and current rendering tools, more players get a chance to revisit them properly instead of fighting compatibility issues for two hours before giving up.
GTA 2 is now joining the growing RTX Remix mod scene, alongside projects for games such as Need for Speed Carbon, Tomb Raider, Max Payne and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Not every classic needs path tracing, sure — but when a modder can make a 1999 top-down crime game glow with modern lighting while keeping its original attitude, that is the kind of PC gaming madness we respect.