Half-Life 2 RTX, remaster with ray-traced graphics, coming as a mod

Half-Life 2Nvidia revealed Tuesday that the highly regarded first-person shooting game from Valve will be remastered in the form a mod which adds ray traced graphics. This announcement was made ahead of Gamescom 2020.

Visuals that are cutting edge Half-Life 2This is an upgrade that fits the game. It was a technologically advanced title for its time. The Gravity Gun, for example, integrated a realistic simulation of physics into the gameplay. There’s no word yet on whether this remaster will arrive in time for the game’s 20th anniversary, which is roughly 15 months from now in November 2024. Nvidia has warned against development. Half-Life 2: RTX, as the project is known, “has just begun.”

Half-Life 2: RTXFollow in the footsteps Portal with RTXThe film was released on December 20, 2022. Portal with RTX was made by Nvidia’s in-house Lightspeed Studios team using RTX Remix, a modding platform that is designed to allow modders to more easily create ray-traced remasters of classic games. RTX Remix — which Nvidia announced in September 2022 — is not yet available to the public, but the company has granted early access to four top Half-Life 2Orbifold Studios is a group of mod teams that have come together to work on the mod.

Asked to clarify whether Nvidia is paying the people working on this project, a company representative told Polygon that Nvidia is “not at liberty to discuss commercial relationships.” The available evidence suggests that development is being conducted on a volunteer basis: This is functionally a mod for Half-Life 2, and it’s being made by modders familiar with the game, rather than Lightspeed Studios or Valve. In fact, Orbifold Studios is “looking to invite the entire mod community to join the effort to build Half-Life 2: RTX,” Nvidia said in a news release. We’ve also reached out to the four teams that comprise Orbifold Studios — Project 17, Half-Life 2 Remade Assets, Half-Life 2 VR, and Raising the Bar: Redux — to ask for additional details, and we’ll update this article when we hear back.

Grid View

What we saw was a small glimpse. Half-Life 2: RTXIn a briefing for the media last week, Nvidia showed a trailer. Nvidia played a trailer for the remaster, although it didn’t show much — the camera simply moved through two versions of Dr. Isaac Kleiner’s laboratory, one with ray tracing disabled and the other with ray tracing enabled.

This is a RTX Remix based project. Half-Life 2: RTX will show off Nvidia’s proprietary graphics- and performance-improving technologies, such as Deep Learning Super Samping (DLSS) 3, Reflex, and RTX IO. The visual upgrades being developed for the remaster — which you can see in six pairs of screenshots Nvidia released alongside Tuesday’s announcement — include materials rebuilt with physically based rendering (so they absorb, reflect, and refract light accurately), and extra geometric detail. A game that was released in 2004 is going to need some upgrades. Lottery TicketsThese screenshots show that textures and text in the world will look better at 4K. (Look at all those now-legible words on Kleiner’s CRT monitors!)

All of these upgrades are waiting for you. Half-Life 2: RTXPC gaming enthusiasts are also concerned about whether they will even be capable of running the game. Our reviewer needed an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, with DLSS enabled, to get “something close to reliable performance” in Portal with RTXThe game is available in 4K. The nearly 12,000 Steam ratings for the game are mixed. Most of the negative reviews come from those complaining about the high system requirements. Nvidia confirmed to Polygon the game’s high system requirements. Half-Life 2: RTXYou may also like Portal with RTX before it, will be compatible with any ray tracing-capable GPU — although Nvidia-exclusive features such as DLSS will require an Nvidia GPU, of course.)

Nvidia Upgrade: Half-Life 2: RTX will not support as of now is the next version of DLSS, the company’s proprietary image reconstruction technology, which uses a variety of techniques to improve image quality while keeping performance high. DLSS 3.5 was also released by Nvidia on Tuesday. It builds upon existing features such as super resolution, frame generation, and ray reconstruction.

Ray reconstruction focuses on the denoising step, which is an important part of ray tracing. It fills out missing pixels using light ray samples from several frames in a video game. The current denoising process produces satisfactory results but removes fine detail from the final picture, causing problems, such as incorrect lighting effects. DLSS 3.5 uses AI-powered ray reconstruction to do a better job, making it so that, for instance, headlights will cast a directionally accurate beam ahead of a car’s front end, rather than being dispersed into a diffuse blob surrounding the vehicle.

Nvidia demonstrated a video of the product in action during its briefing. Phantom LibertyThe upcoming expansion of Cyberpunk 2077Other titles that will soon support DLSS 3.5 include Remedy Entertainment’s. Other titles coming soon with DLSS 3.5 support include Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2The release date of the film was moved up to October 27. Portal with RTX.

Most importantly, DLSS 3.5 will work with all of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs going back to the first-generation RTX 20-series cards, which are coming up on 5 years old. This is a nice change from the typical trend: The frame generation technology in DLSS 3 requires one of the company’s newest cards, the RTX 40-series GPUs.