Earlier this month, we informed you about NVIDIA working on more RTX remakes/remaster of classic PC games. One of the games that immediately popped up the moment we published that article was Half-Life. And today, we can finally get a glimpse at what a Half-Life RTX Remake could look like.
Now before continuing, this isn’t an official demonstration of Half-Life RTX. NVIDIA has not revealed whether it’s working on such a remaster/remake or not. This tech demo was created by Vect0R in order to give us a taste of real-time ray tracing effects in Valve’s classic shooter.
Vect0R took assets from Half-Life and converted them to Quake 2’s format and then he created a total conversion modification for Quake 2 RTX. In short, this Half-Life RTX project basically uses the ray tracing effects/features of Quake 2 RTX. What this also means is that modders can create total conversions of other classic games in Quake 2 RTX.
Unfortunately, Vect0R doesn’t have any plans to release this Half-Life RTX mod for Quake 2 RTX. According to the modder, this project is not in a playable stage right now.
But anyway, this is a really cool concept that, at least in our opinion, deserves the spotlight. It also gives us an idea of what the classic Half Life game could look like with Ray Tracing.
Enjoy!
![Half-Life RTX | Quick Teaser [HLRTX]](https://www.dsogaming.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-youtube-lyte/lyteCache.php?origThumbUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fe5OC6bmXLI8%2F0.jpg)
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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Looks like HL 1 with the new souse engine. Better shadows and lightning/water already exist on Steam. Sure this looks even better but ye, nothing shocking lol. What i wanna see is Doom 3.
I can imagine how NOLF1+2,MOH:Allied Assault and old GTA will look beautiful using this tech…
Needs more light bounce and wider luminosity range.
Amazing. It looks like a game from 1998, with better water. Someone catch me, I may faint.
Im not a fan of this low poly games (Half Life is a masterpiece, dont get me wrong) with high end lighting effects. The contrast is too much, but well…there’s people that like Minecraft with raytracing too.
Its why old (and some new) CGI in movies looks sh*t. They great this great creature or whatever, but then don’t light it light the scene they put it in. So it looks total sh*t even if its some great model.
I just watch the new Predator movie. And the big predator jumps down into the kids basement. It looked so horrible because none of the lights in the basement at all looked like they were lighting the predator. He had totally static lighting effects. Its looked terrible.
Its cause the pipeline for creating and rendering CGI scenes have been getting a lot of procedural treatment. Automation is great at churning out low quality high quantity. Look at the release dates between marvel flicks. Its impossible to do that with proper manual care.
The sweat of the brow counts for nothing these days. Something like Lord of the Rings will never be made in this day and age. Its technocracy mate. The age of reboots and factory CGI.
woooooooooooow look at those water relfections. they look almost as good as the water from the original half-life 2 15 years ago.
ray tracing is technicly impressive, of course. but it’s the same story than physX. yeah, technicaly impressive, but havok simulate almost the same results 10 years before.
its not at all the same story as physx. Like, at all. In the slightest. Raytracing is a major feature since decades ago. And its gonna be here for a long, long, long time. Its not going anywhere and its not insignificant. Its just getting started
is there a texture pack for it?
Excellent!
Looks pretty cool, except for Gordon’s hand and gun which are too shiny. The environments look great though.
I still play this game and all its variants, matter of fact I just got whipped in HLDM last night by my kid. Or as we used to say, PWNT. Ugg.,…
Lighting is the most important part I agree. Thats the main reason why cryengine looks so good compared to the rest still. Their SVOTI realtime GI tech is freakin mindblowing at times. But what I don’t agree with is the RTX treatment. It’s exclusively an nvidia thing right now and even then for their rtx series gpus. Crytek succesfully implemented a playable build for AMD’s cards (you can find the vid on cryengine’s official youtube). If that really is possible for current gen, then nvidia are forcibly segregating the gpu consumers for the sake of selling new cards year in year out. Nothing surprising there from just another corporate thug afterall.
and crytek need to do a lot of trick for that. and even with those tricks the performance impact is still quite big. remember they run those Noir RT demo using Vega 56 at 1080p to get 30FPS. and to get there they reduce the RT resolution (reflection to be specific) to half. plus they use other baked effect to mimic how RT looks when the very point of using RT is to get rid those baked effect. rather than forcing nvidia approach actually is the most sensible one if you really want to use RT in your games.
Yea but I guess even modern games like Control reduces the resolution for performance, don’t they? I thought that was a necessity for current gen rtx gpus. Correct me if wrong about that tho. However, if I had to put my money on it, i’d say none of Noir RT is baked. Isn’t the whole point of RT to be ‘realtime’? I mean, its in the name right..
But on control you did not reduce the ray tracing resolution. In Noir demo if the scene is being rendered at 1080p then the RT effect specifically will be reduce to half of that to improve performance. And in the end Crytek even admit that RTX hardware can speed things up without the need to use above trick.
You should read crytek own explanation about what they did with the demo to get that 30fps on vega 56
https://www.cryengine.com/news/view/how-we-made-neon-noir-ray-traced-reflections-in-cryengine-and-more
Ahh thanks. Missed out on that making of blog. So they’ve made quite the optimisation decisions there but you still can’t call the other lighting effects baked because cryengine doesn’t bake lightmaps at all under their SVOTI tech. That is the reason why cryengine doesn’t require any lightmap UVs (static baking) while Unity and Unreal does. Its not RT but its still realtime.
Yea youve pinned the donkey there mate. The general consensus is that Unreal is top of the line for image quality. No wonder the ArchViz community use it almost exclusively. Cryengine looks inferior when comparing images one to one. But man the dynamic lighting in CE in motion is out of this world. This is purely subjective but im all for cryengine when it comes to general lighting output. But then again, I guess there’s a reason why Unreal totally ditched their custom Global Illumination tech they were working on.
Bad a*s!!
should have faithfully recreated the original lighting instead of going overboard with volumetrics and a low sun angle.