Orbifold Studios will release the demo for Half-Life 2 RTX later today. NVIDIA has provided us with a preview code, so it’s time to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 572.70, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.3.1 drivers. And yes, you read that right. We have bought an AMD Radeon RX 9070XT.
Half-Life 2 RTX does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, I used the following scene. This scene has a lot of volumetric effects, and it’s the most demanding area I could find.
Half-Life 2 RTX uses Full Ray Tracing/Path Tracing, and comes with new 3D models. And, to play at native 1080p, you’ll need an NVIDIA RTX 5090. As for native 1440p, there is no GPU that can run the demo smoothly.
These results shouldn’t come as a surprise. Half-Life 2 RTX with its new lighting system and its new materials looks as good as modern-day titles. Contrary to Quake 2 RTX, Half-Life 2 RTX has higher-quality textures and more detailed 3D objects/items/characters. I cannot stress enough how good the demo looks.
Half-Life 2 RTX supports DLSS 4, but there is no support for AMD FSR 3.0 or Intel XeSS. That’s a bummer as AMD users won’t be able to enjoy it unless they mod the demo to replace DLSS with FSR.
With DLSS 4 Performance Mode (no Frame Gen), the RTX 5090 can provide a smooth gaming experience, even at 4K. Yes, there were some drops to 54FPS. As I said, though, this is the most demanding area. Other areas run way better than it. Plus, those with a G-Sync monitor won’t really notice these framerate drops.
What’s interesting here is that DLSS 4 Performance Mode provides a BETTER image at 1080p. This is thanks to the Transformer Model. This is the first time I’ve seen DLSS 4 perform THAT well in such a low resolution.
For the best gaming experience at 4K, I highly recommend using DLSS 4 Performance Mode with Frame Gen. With DLSS 4 Performance Mode and MFG X2, the RTX 5090 was able to push framerates over 98FPS. And, since the base framerate was quite high, I did not experience any major input latency issues.
I’ve also tried MFG X3 and X4. And, to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed by them. Both of them introduced a lot of visual artifacts. Speaking of visual artifacts, there are also some with MFG X2. However, they were not THAT distracting. With MFG X3 and X4, things go downhill pretty quickly. And that’s with a pretty good base framerate. I can’t imagine the visual artifacts that you’ll get with a base framerate of 30FPS or 40FPS. So, right now, I don’t recommend using it, even if you own a 240Hz monitor.
Graphics-wise, Half-Life 2 RTX is among the best looking games on PC. Everything looks top-notch. From the lighting to reflections, shadows, and objects; everything looks amazing. This right here shows how transformative RTX Remix can be. I know some of you have been disappointed by some of the RTX Remix Mods I’ve shared. However, Half-Life 2 RTX is incredible.
And there you have it. Half-Life 2 RTX Demo is a graphical showcase on PC. Yes, you’ll need a high-end GPU. However, keep in mind that we’re talking about real-time Path Tracing. Plus, it looks unbelievably beautiful. So yes, it more than justifies its high GPU requirements.
Enjoy 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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This is exactly what I was waiting to hear. Orbifold has done it.
as always i appreciate the benchmarks.
Not trying to be negative, but this is apparently another lazy remaster by Ngreedia just to sell more of its overpriced GPUs (specifically the elite-tier GPUs like the 4090 or 5090), they didn't even bother to adapt to the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update features as the UI in here doesn't even scale with resolution like what the former already does.
"Half-Life 2 RTX was in development long before the 20th Anniversary Update was released!" No my friend, the update has been released for like 4 months now, and the former is already not an excuse to scam people with cheap, shady and obvious tricks like what Ngreedia is doing here just as it always does.
You`re a hatefull, sad person with poisoned mind. This is amazing, free remaster. Too bad the optimization is non-existent because it won`t run on mid-range cards like RTX 5070 in descent FPS it seems.
Hey snowflake, if simple words exposing corporate greed like these hurt your feelings so much, then the internet is simply not for you.
You're absolutely right on this one, but you do realize that this unoptimized mess is actually on purpose just to force people into buying overpriced GPUs like the 4090 and 5090? If you can't realize that by now since you don't know Ngreedia's history and reputation, then that's not my problem.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/da1f974ab503b5687f56da0e940952b6307122e36615c421783d935b5f6e855b.jpg
4090 has been the best value (even though overpriced) I managed to pick one up used for a really good price, cheaper than new 5080.
But I agree, cards are getting really stupidly expensive now.
Also I sort of agree on this RTX Remix mod, some of it looks noticeably better, but then something also doesn't look quite right, maybe it's because there are parts that haven't been touched, so some of it looks dated but other parts look nice.. hmm I dunno.
i love rtx remix but it was supposed to be fastttt and like piece of cake .will it be fast now that its out of beta phase at last??
It looks like you don't know what rtx remix is.
Techdemo.
Underwhelming again. RT is sht without the right tweaks. Where is the dynamic lighting? there's so much fire around yet the lighting around is static and dull. Do these devs ever saw a real life fire?
One can re-create this scene better with traditional rendering!
The funny part is the game whit RT/models/meshes off runs like a*s to. RTX remix itself is demanding
Fantastic. Thanks for the benchmarks.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/983705e3c89252e7129ebfa4a968bd3cbc6fe68e771cd6ab95ec9030f8ef09a5.jpg
Am I the only one disappointed by this remaster?
I think that I'm going to be perfectly fine with the original game. 🤔
You are missing the point of this comparison: The 2004 one is rasterized, basically "drawn by hand". The RTX one is real time with dynamic path traced lighting. The goal was to recreate the look of the original but with dynamic lighting that can adjust better to dynamic situations. So the two screenshots in your post simply show how close the team came with trying to recreate the same look with a totally different system.
It is not supposed to look totally different.
It is supposed to look as similar as possible but dynamic.
OK, thanks for the explanation.
I might prefer the darker lighting in the original game.
Now I'm curious to see that technology in the Left 4 Dead games…
There are already some promising videos on Youtube, but it's work-in-progress.
After playing the game I changed my mind about performance. The game doesnt run nearly as bad as benchmarks suggest. On my RTX4080S I get 40fps at 1440p native and around 80-100fps with DLSSQuality + RR (140-160fps with FG). At 4K I need to use DLSS performance to get 50-60fps (90-110fps with FGx2).
The image quality looks however extremely bad. The problem is the ray reconstruction blurs fine details on textures and also applies strong contrast sharpening to the lighting, which makes the image look DNR'd (like some ugly UHD transfers like Terminator 2). As a big fan of HL2 I've been waiting to play the RTX mod, but the image quality is killing my enjoyment and I don't give a damn about path tracing when the image quality is this bad. I can accept the framerate in HL2 RTX and even the terrible frame delivery, but my eyes refuse to look at such a blurry image.
For me it’s a bug. Every time I load the demo, it crashes on menu screen and my pc reboots itself.
Iam running 7950X3D, rtx 4090 with latest 572.83 drivers.
Seems like a lot of half life fans are getting personally offended over anything that doesn’t praise this demo. But in all honesty it wasn’t that great. Seems to be lacking a lot of emissive lighting. For example from the gravity gun. It’s not an ugly game. But it’s not as good as I expected considering all the hype. Nvidia should have gotten involved to provide assistance with the project.