Modders from the Orbifold Studios team, with the support of Nvidia, have announced a demo of Half-Life 2 RTX, a remaster of the legendary Valve shooter based on the RTX Remix platform.
Image Source: Valve
As it became known, Half-Life 2 RTX will be available for testing next week. The demo version will be released on March 18 and will be available on Steam. Nvidia, on the occasion of the announcement, published a video demonstrating the graphical features of the project.
The trial edition will allow you to evaluate two updated locations – the zombie-infested abandoned city of Ravenholm from the level “We don’t go to Ravenholm…” and the maximum security prison “Nova Prospekt” from the chapter of the same name.
The Half-Life 2 RTX demo will feature support for path tracing, DLSS 4 upscaling with multi-frame generation, Nvidia Reflex for lower latency, and three new Nvidia technologies:
- RTX Neural Radiance Cache indirect lighting calculation;
- Subsurface scattering RTX Skin;
- RTX Volumetrics light scattering.
Following the announcement, IGN published over 32 minutes of gameplay from the Half-Life 2 RTX demo. Available in 4K resolution at 60 fps, the video was recorded on a PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card.
Orbifold Studios updated all the textures, models, and even particles in Half-Life 2, reworked the lighting, implemented physically based rendering (PBR), but left the iconic gameplay unchanged.
Half-Life 2 RTX is billed as the “most comprehensive graphical remaster” of Half-Life 2 and a free add-on for all owners of the original game. There is no release date for the remaster at this stage.