Nvidia is making a Fallout 4 mod to promote its new graphics cards

The latest modder working on new content for Fallout 4 isn’t exactly a person working out of their basement.

Nvidia is planning to release a mod for the open-world postapocalyptic adventure Fallout 4 to show off some of the technology that developers can take advantage of in its 10-series GeForce GTX cards. The add-on, called Vault 1080, borrows its title from the GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. It features advanced lighting and shadows and around 60 minutes of new gameplay, according to the hardware company. Nvidia will show off more from the mod this weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo gathering in Seattle before Vault 1080 hits the Bethesda.net mod program.

“The team that created Vault 1080 are modders and gamers themselves — and big fans of the Fallout universe,” Nvidia LightSpeed Studio producer Dane Johnston told GamesBeat. “We spent an afternoon brainstorming, just throwing out as many ideas as we could.  We discussed the things we liked about Fallout and how we could expand on them first, and specifically how we can make them better with the GameWorks technologies second.  Eventually, the idea for the story and quest began to take shape.”

You can get a glimpse of the new content in the teaser trailer below:

This is a new way of using mods. In the past, add-on modules were usually community-built creations that players could install into their games by fiddling with program files. For modern Bethesda games, modding tools are built into the interface on PC as well as Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Due to that high visibility, modding is easier than ever, and that played a part in convincing Nvidia to use it as a means of promoting its hardware.

“Fallout 4 is incredibly open to modding and also has a lot of NVIDIA GameWorks technology, with a key one being our volumetric lighting used heavily in outdoor scene,” said Johnston. “We saw an opportunity to do something unique by showing what volumetric lighting could bring to the atmosphere inside a vault. The level of mood and intensity this new GameWorks library afforded us made it a natural fit for the Fallout universe and makes things like dust and dreary come alive.”

Nvidia regularly makes demo software to showcase its technology. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo industry trade show in Los Angeles this past June, I visited the company’s booth and experienced its VR Funhouse game. That software is now available for free on Steam so that anyone with a relatively powerful Nvidia graphics card can play around with the interactive physics that the company is emphasizing to VR developers.

Now, with Vault 1080, Nvidia is trying something new to let gamers know that it is pushing gaming visuals forward. And maybe that’ll convince a few customers to throw down the $600 for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU.