Fallout: New Vegas will return as a remaster—Bethesda made that official a few months ago. But since the release of the latest fan project, I’ve been wondering if I even need the remaster anymore.
Fallout: New Vegas just turned 16, and you can definitely tell the role-playing game is showing its age. Graphically, one of the best Fallout games naturally can’t keep up with today’s standards—at least that was true until a few weeks ago. Now, a single mod has polished up the visuals of post-apocalyptic Nevada so thoroughly that I’m starting to wonder how the official remaster can possibly compete.
New Vegas in All Its New Glory
What’s it all about? It’s about New Vegas RTX, a mod that gives Fallout: New Vegas a new renderer using the Nvidia tool RTX Remix. The world is now lit using path tracing, which results in significantly more realistic lighting, reflections, and detailed object shadows. The mod also supports height maps for textures, allowing New Vegas to benefit from detailed terrain and surface textures from compatible mods.
Why is this special? New Vegas RTX is a small revolution for the game’s modding scene, for several reasons:
- New Vegas looks impressively modern with just one mod: Even without supporting texture mods, the graphical leap is huge. In the past, achieving something comparable required installing numerous complex mods for weather, lighting, and textures.
- New Vegas RTX is much easier to use: While the installation requires a few of the most widely used tools and bug fixes, you should install them anyway if you want to mod New Vegas or simply play as stably as possible. RTX also provides DLSS and Frame Generation, which help keep performance costs much better in check than with other advanced graphics mods. With its simple installation process, it’s also much easier to avoid errors than with ENBs or NVR.
- Mods remain compatible: Most mods can already be combined with RTX without any issues, even if we have to do without a few features. Since RTX is still under active development, things may change here; currently, there are still a few bugs that the developer intends to fix.
But let’s let the pictures speak for themselves—here’s a quick comparison between New Vegas without mods, my setup from last year with over 200 mods, and a simple combination of New Vegas RTX and a handful of texture mods:
Note that these are individual screenshots that, while showing the same location, were taken at different times of day within the game. So they aren’t 100 percent identical, but they should give you a good idea of how the graphics differ.
How is Bethesda supposed to keep up?
By now, I’m almost certain: I don’t even need an official remaster for New Vegas—one that might not be released for another two years or even later. Because Obsidian’s RPG already looks great with just one mod, and that’s not all. For over 16 years, fans have passionately worked on new weapons, quests, mechanics, textures, and improvements for the RPG.
Bethesda can’t possibly replace this work—as our experience with Oblivion Remastered shows. Even with the official re-release of New Vegas, mods for the original probably won’t be compatible anymore. It’ll likely just be another polished-up version that’s almost identical to the original in terms of gameplay and content. And that means I’d have to give up so much:
- Large, high-quality fan-made expansions like Long 15, which meaningfully expand the game world, complete with new quest lines, gear, and all the trimmings.
- World design improvements such as Mojave Scenery Overhaul or Desert Landscapes, which add elaborate details to many locations, making the world feel more believable and natural.
- Mods that add immersive mechanics, such as animations for using Stimpaks.
With the release of New Vegas RTX, the remaster loses yet another of its last remaining selling points for me: that it (probably) looks better than the original. Sure, anyone who wants a modernized and stable version of one of the best Fallout games without any effort might find what they’re looking for in the official remaster. But Oblivion Remastered has shown that even stability and performance aren’t guaranteed—not even today.
Of course, we still don’t know what Bethesda will actually deliver with Fallout: New Vegas Remastered. Maybe the remaster will manage to do something modders haven’t been able to do yet, like incorporating the more modern power armor from Fallout 4? I doubt it, but maybe Bethesda will surprise me after all. Until then, though, I’ll stick to playing Fallout: New Vegas in its best, modded version. And I’m looking forward to the new Fallout from Obsidian. These are good times, after all.
