YouTube’s ‘Brian Tate’ has shared a video, showcasing 12 minutes of gameplay footage from an upcoming VR Mod for Half-Life 2. As the title suggests, this mod will allow you to play this classic game in VR, and does not need any other mods in order to work properly.
Led by Cabalistic and a team of modders, Half-Life 2 VR Mod features full MSAA support and the Vulkan API. As such, performance should be better than what Half-Life 2 offers by default.
This VR Mod will allow you to do things that were almost impossible in the non-VR version. For instance, you can spin the blocks in the playground just by hitting them or play tetherball with a corpse in Ravenholm. You will also be able to physically dodge for cover, and manually reload your guns.
For this video, Brian Tate grabbed an existing texture pack for HL2 that replaces 100% of the textures and it makes a huge difference in VR.
Although there isn’t any ETA on when it will come out, there are plans to have an open beta soon.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I’m certainly looking forward to Half Life 2 in VR, however I have mixed feelings about Vulkan being the rendering API. Sadly ReShade doesn’t yet support Vulkan in VR applications (it can only hook the desktop mirror and not the VR output), which means the people working on the mod will have to get the graphics configuration perfect or give us the option to tweak most of the settings in-game, as we won’t have the option to inject shaders to fix things.
Indeed, Vulkan is concerning. I haven’t seen one excample of Vulkan giving the edge to any game so far.
You obviously haven’t looked hard enough…
Also, on which GPU & drivers are you running Vulkan games?
Vulkan is a good graphics API, however it’s important to note that its performance advantage over DirectX 12 is really only noticeable on newer video cards. I’ve seen data showing that on RTX 20 series and RTX 30 series cards there was usually a noticeable increase in FPS with Vulkan over DirectX 12, however on GTX 10 series cards (like my GTX 1080 Ti) there was usually no FPS increase with Vulkan and in some cases FPS was slightly higher with DirectX 12.
It’s always good to keep in mind that the performance of a specific graphics API can vary based on hardware, and not just on the GPU in use. Different CPU’s, different types/speeds/latencies of RAM, and sometimes even different types of storage (hard drives/SATA SSD’s/NVMe SSD’s/etc) can effect performance in different ways for different rendering API’s depending on how efficiently the game developers implemented those API’s and how they designed their game.
It’s definitely true that with each new generation, GPUs are getting more optimized towards running low-level APIs like Vulkan rather than high-level APIs like OpenGL.
Case in point for nVidia:
A translation layer exists that converts OpenGL calls to Vulkan called Zink, where the lead developer has shown benchmarks in which Zink actually manages to beat nVidia’s native OpenGL driver (on Turing), which is widely considered to be best-in-class.
This is also the reason why DXVK often manages to beat native DirectX drivers even on Windows, especially with DX9 on newer GPUs.
(Most prominent example: GTA 4)
I’m All Over It , As Far as I’m Concerned, Valve is Really Only One of The Few Gaming Companies, That Demonstrates A true Leader Among The Pack in High End Graphics Combined with Immersive Gaming.Their in a League Of their Own ..They Set The highest Standard Of Engine Optimization..
Why do you use big letters for each word? Who taught you this?!
Interesting…
I’m excited for it, I haven’t played Half-Life 2 yet so