Half-Life 2 Is Getting A Ray-Traced Remaster Courtesy Of RTX Remix
Half-Life 2 Is Getting A Ray-Traced Remaster Courtesy Of RTX Remix
Following Portal with RTX, NVIDIA has set their eyes on a second Valve title to give it a RTX-themed makeover. The game in question is the much popular Half-Life 2: technically, NVIDIA isn’t working on this game – but rather, it’s the modding community that took up the task of remaking this game by utilizing NVIDIA’s free-to-use RTX Remix toolset.
The GPU company has offloaded the work to a dedicated studio, Orbifold Studios, which consists of “four of Half-Life 2’s top mod teams”. To make this work, RTX Remix will be used to rebuild materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties, with extra geometric detail added via Valve’s Hammer editor, plus all the NVIDIA RTX technologies such as ray tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex and RTX IO. It’s still a work-in-progress – but there’s already an announcement trailer and some early images on how the remake turns out to be.
Certainly a massive improvement, 19 years on – there’s more previews that you can see for yourself via NVIDIA’s blogs here. It’s worth nothing that this remake will be utilizing full path tracing, meaning the compute power will be massive with the conversion in place. NVIDIA says the remake will increase texture pixel count by 8x, and the geometric detail is increased by 20x compared to the original release back in November 2004.
In the other Valve-made game, Portal with RTX, it will be one of the first three titles to receive DLSS 3.5 support which includes Ray Reconstruction – which help create a more accurate reconstruction of lighting reflections by optimizing denoising pipeline with AI-trained data. The update will arrive this fall, says the company.
Pokdepinion: It looks like an entirely different game with realistic graphics. Won’t be easy to run, for sure.
