NVIDIA has shared the CES 2024 trailer for Half-Life 2 RTX which showcases the full path tracing effects of this upcoming remaster. This trailer has some comparison screenshots which will give you an idea of the graphical improvements that path tracing will bring to the table.
Half-Life 2 RTX will also support DLSS 3 Frame Generation and DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction. By using Frame Generation, RTX40 series owners will be able to improve the game’s performance. Since it will be using full Path Tracing, you’re going to need it. And no, there is no word on whether it will support FSR 3.0. However, owners of older RTX GPUs will be able to use the “DLSS 3 to FSR 3.0” Mod. From what we’ve seen, this mod works fine in games that support Path Tracing.
Half-Life 2 RTX is being developed by four of Half-Life 2’s top mod teams, now known as Orbifold Studios. This remaster will also come with new assets. These assets will aim to come close to the original ones but also make the game look on par with most modern-day triple-A titles.
From what we know Orbifold Studios rebuilt materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties. Not only that but the team added extra geometric detail via Valve’s Hammer editor. In Half-Life 2 RTX, average world textures have 8X the pixels, and assets like the suit feature 20X the geometric detail of the original game.
Sadly, there is still no word on when Half-Life 2 RTX will come out. As usual, though, we’ll be sure to keep you posted.
Enjoy the trailer and stay tuned for more!
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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Does anyone else prefer it with RTX off?
Anyway, when given a choice between Half Life 2 VR and Half Life 2 RTX, I will pick Half Life 2 VR every time.
No.
Why limit yourself like that?
One day, you will be able to enjoy Half-Life 2 RTX in VR…
Yeah, in about 10 years GPU’s may be able to run path tracing with high enough FPS at the resolutions used in VR to be able to pull it off. By then hopefully the raytracing fad will be over, and NVIDIA will be dumping their money into things that actually help gaming.
I don’t think raytracing fad will be over. More likely AMD’s gpus, all consoles and mid range pcs are going to have rtx features that doesn’t reduce performance that much. Some games will even refuse to run without rtx like metro exodus enhanched 2019. Why? because its lot less work to program raytracing lights and shadow than manually having lights baked in
It depends on how long it takes for GPU’s to get to the point where they can handle full time raytracing without any significant performance drop, and how long it takes for gamers to update to them and for those types of graphics chips to end up in game consoles. If game developers can’t make games that are raytracing only and expect reasonable sales then they will have to continue to waste time and resources making games that support multiple light rendering techniques, and eventually some game studios may just decide to stop wasting time on raytracing.
Right now raytracing is big because NVIDIA is paying for it. I seriously wonder how many developers would bother if they weren’t getting money to add it to their games.
Ray tracing is here to stay. It’ll probably replace most, if not all, rasterization some day.
That’s the kool-aide that NVIDIA is handing out, but I’m not sure if that’s actually how it will play out. We’re seeing the number of people who despise TAA growing every day (which is necessary to blend the spotty lighting that raytracing produces), and most gamers on PC can’t even experience raytracing due to the hardware requirements or just don’t want it on due to the performance impact, so I think once NVIDIA is done dumping money into RTX the fad will die out.
It’s not a fad. Ray tracing has been a thing for decades, it’s just now it’s somewhat usable, and as I said, it’ll probably replace rasterization some day.
It’s a fad to put it in games, despite the fact that even the most power GPU’s can’t render ray tracing at full resolution in most modern games at a reasonable framerate. To most gamers raytracing is either a curiosity that’s not worth playing games with due to low FPS, or it’s just another annoying technology that NVIDIA is pushing that makes their gaming experience worse and they just don’t want.
The only reason anyone cares about raytracing at all is because NVIDIA is throwing money at everyone to promote it and put it in their games. If it wasn’t for that, I doubt anyone would even care.
Just because people don’t know what ray tracing is about doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. As I said repeatedly, I’m pretty sure ray tracing will factor out rasterization sooner or later.
People understand what raytracing is. It’s not that complicated. A method of rendering lighting, shadows, and reflections that calculates the path light takes and when it bounces off of things. I knew that in 2005 when Intel falsely claimed they had designed a GPU that could do real-time raytracing at 30 FPS.
In 2005 raytracing sounded cool. When we finally got it in videogames in 2018 it was a disappointment. It still mostly is a disappointment. From statistics I’ve seen (ones not published by NVIDIA that is) while a large percentage of gamers have turned on raytracing at some point, most play with it off even if that have raytracing capable GPU’s. Also from Steam hardware survey results, it looks like more than half of PC gamers are still on GTX video cards and can’t even play games with raytracing.
Raytracing is a technology that, even after 6 years of inclusion in video games, is still not ready for prime time. It requires some sort of blending and temporal smoothing (TAA, DLSS, FSR, XeSS, or TSR) in order to make it look like it’s not just a collection of bright dots on the screen because it’s rendered at a lower resolution than the rest of the scene, even subsampled it is a performance killer, and a lot of people don’t even like the lighting effects from raytracing.
Ray tracing has been a thing since the 60s. I agree that it’s not ready for prime time, that’s why I said (for like the 4th time?) that it will replace rasterization one day. It’s not a fad like you claim it to be.
It may not seem like a fad to fanboys, but then again fads never do. I’ll be happy when raytracing is dead and gone and game devs go back to sensible game design.
Lol. I’m not a fan of games implementing it just because of the gimmick it’s used as today. You clearly don’t understand what ray tracing is about.
Just because someone doesn’t like something, that doesn’t mean they don’t understand it.
I didn’t say that though. But you clearly don’t understand it regardless. 🙂
You’ve accused people who don’t like raytracing of not understanding it at least 4 times now. You’re wrong of course.
Video game engine developers had already come up with ways to simulate fairly realistic lighting before raytracing, and the methods they came up had significantly better performance than raytracing. This is why raytracing is a gimmick at best, because most people can’t even tell when it’s on and the hit to FPS is so extreme that it just isn’t worth it. The raytracing in video games just isn’t very visually impressive, and its adoption is being pushed entirely by big companies that are pumping money into it.
No, I’ve only said it to you, and it has nothing to do with if you like it or not. Your posts here clearly shows you don’t know what ray tracing is about. It’s not a fad and in the future it’ll be the standard. Right now it’s just something added on top, that will change.
You’re probably just trolling at this point. Have a nice day.
Original has it’s charm, but RTX looks awesome in this case!
The lighting with RTX on didn’t look any better to me. With Portal they had new materials/textures that looked awesome, but in this one the new materials/textures don’t look that good.
Hell no
yeah its too shinny and glossy and sharp.
In great part due to the intentional “ugly” artistic intent for the Ravenholm level, not even RTX makes it look more likeable or desirable to play for me, even if the graphics are technically very superior. Curious case.
Raveholm is one of the last remnant’s of the 2001-2002 beta era, that’s why it feels so different from the rest of the game.
Beta means feature complete, you’re just testing and fixing bugs. There couldn’t have been a beta in 2001 or 2002. Maybe the leaked version could be considered an alpha. Although by modern game standards it would be considered a “pre-pre-pre-alpha” and it would be available for purchase in Early Access for the next five years before being declared version 1.0. Version 1.0 would introduce three bug fixes.
I can’t wait until ray tracing is standard for everything. Wonder how many years that’ll take
Valve scared to make a proper 3 and rightly so, impossible expectations to meet, have to come up with rules for user reviews on steam to limit negatives so much not worth it. Print money, throw some little treats out there for the dogs to be happy, go to the bank very happy happy lol Shovel sellers made more out of gold rush then anyone else lol
Half Life 2 RTX Path Tracing = 2 fps !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No HL3 Rip PC Gaming !!!
“Lads, this shït is almost useless, so let’s make videos from old af games, were we change some things to make it look cooler. This way we can continue to push this scam forward, while we milk the morön’s wallets.”
am i the only one who doesnt like how this makes hl2 look like its running on unreal engine 5 with shinny surfaces and sharpening everywhere, too clean and blurry shadows.
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