Fallout Tale of Two Wastelands RTX Remix Project Brings Neural Rendering to Capital Wasteland

Ruins across the Capital Wasteland pick up sunlight and shadow in ways Bethesda’s original fixed lighting never quite managed when Fallout 3 first arrived. A small fan effort has been stitching RTX Remix, ray reconstruction, and neural rendering into Tale of Two Wastelands, the long-running project that drops Fallout 3 and its expansions into the Fallout: New Vegas engine so both games can run as one continuous playthrough. The result, shown in a short gameplay video released mid-October, already shifts familiar locations enough that some viewers describe the footage as looking like an entirely different game.

The Tale of Two Wastelands has been going strong for years, as it is essentially the go-to way to take Fallout 3’s story and locations and shoehorn them into the more flexible New Vegas engine, where it can take advantage of better scripting, iron sights, and companion systems while still allowing you to travel to both wastelands with a single character. Currently, it is built on top of Nuclear Sunset, a large hardcore modlist that already adds survival features, texture packs, and a slew of other improvements to the combined foundation. Recently, the individual behind that video has been working on integrating the NVIDIA RTX Remix tools, determining how the contemporary rendering approach interacts with the existing mod stack, and analyzing how much ray reconstruction and neural rendering alter the appearance of the insides and outsides.

NVIDIA’s RTX Remix basically intercepts the DirectX calls that New Vegas (and hence Tale of Two Wastelands) still makes, and then adds path-traced lighting, material updates, and AI-powered image processing on top of them. According on what I’ve seen in the test film, the neural rendering and ray reconstruction components are improving the lighting, increasing bounce and reflection detail, and sharpening surfaces that the old engine left soft or flat. Early frames reveal a lot more contrast between light and dark on concrete walls, more vivid reflections on metal and glass, and plants that keep their shape much better under the new lighting. There are still a few locations where the high quality textures don’t quite fit in with the older stuff, as well as a couple images out in the open that appear brighter and less dusty than the iconic Fallout green-tinted appearance we all know and love.

There is no news yet on when or if it will be released to the public. The movie is more of a progress check than a finished project, as it displays the state of the mod after weeks of tinkering with the RTX Remix tools to get everything working properly. For those who already have a Tale of Two Wastelands installation, running this stuff is probably the best way to get a hands-on look at how the RTX Remix lighting and neural tools can be placed on top of an already large modlist without having to completely rewrite the engine. The question is whether the final few kinks are worked out enough to make a stable public build, but even with the issues, the footage already shows how much the Capital and Mojave landscapes can change when modern reconstruction and neural processing are applied to the old engine.
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