Half-Life 2 RTX demo to be released on March 18 — NVIDIA releases RTX Remix

NVIDIA has officially released the RTX Remix toolkit, and with it, a Half-Life 2 RTX demo will be available. Also, a 50-minute gameplay is available online.

As the development of the fan-created Half-Life 2 — remaster continues, NVIDIA is releasing a free demo along with a set of modification tools. The project is being developed by the Orbifold Studios team which brings together four leading modding teams. The team has updated the game with physical-body rendering (PBR) and added more geometric detail with Valve’s Hammer editor. In the RTX version of Half-Life 2, the world’s textures now have more pixels, as do elements such as costumes.

This is what you can expect from the updated version of the game:

• Full ray tracing: all graphics are calculated in real time, without preliminary lighting
• Improved models and textures: levels received 8 times more details, and characters received 30 times more polygons
• DLSS 4 and RTX Neural Radiance Cache: increasing productivity through neural networks
• New rendering technologies: RTX Skin for realistic character skin and RTX Volumetrics for fog and light effects

The demo will also show two locations that have already been fully adapted for RTX Remix — Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt. In the video showing the differences between the updated and original versions, you can see a significant improvement in textures.

In another gameplay video, the reviewer tried to break a lamp with a crossbow and other weapons (although no one promised destruction mechanics). The main feature was that the movement of the lamp affected the direction and intensity of the light.

What is RTX Remix

This is a tool for modifying games on DirectX 8 and 9which allows you to add modern graphics technologies. RTX Remix was announced back in 2022and released in 2023. Its features:

• Easy to use interface
• Support for ray tracing, DLSS, and enhanced textures
• Using AI to automatically update graphics

In particular, RTX Skin allows ray-traced light to penetrate translucent materials such as leather, wax, marble, or jade. The Neural Radiance Cache trains a neural network on game content to improve indirect lighting detail and performance by up to 15%. Also, the new RTX IO feature manages texture settings to maintain maximum texture detail without exceeding the GPU’s video memory limit

NVIDIA used this toolkit to create an updated version of Portal. Independent modders have used early versions of the code to update classic games from the early 2000s, such as Max Payne, Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, SWAT 4, and Need for Speed Underground 2.

It is not yet known when the final version of Half-Life 2 will be released. But the Half-Life 2 RTX demo will be available on March 18 to all owners of the original game on Steam.

Source: DSOGaming