Half-Life 2 RTX and all of its foggy, ray-traced lighting is getting a demo next week – Rock Paper Shotgun
Why does this Ray love tracing so much anyway?
Remember when Nvidia announced that Half-Life 2 RTX mod way back in, crikey, 2023? Yeah, I didn’t realise how long it had been either. To be perfectly honest I thought it had already come out, but apparently not, because just this week Nvidia shared that Half-Life 2 RTX is getting a demo next week on March 18th. No, the full mod still doesn’t have a release date, but when do any game projects ever release quickly after they were announced?
The demo will specifically let you play through the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt levels, and a really long blog post from Nvidia has desperately tried to make it clear all of the ways this mod supposedly makes the original game look better. Apparently “every aspect of each level has been upgraded” and everything from weapons, to enemies, to skyboxes have all been remade.
Nvidia’s blog post lets you do that thing where you can slide an image back and forth to see what it looks like with RTX on and off, and to be perfectly honest, most of the time it doesn’t look better, it just looks foggier. The original game still looks incredible to this day if you ask me, there’s a reason so many people still love it.
Besides, most people aren’t going to be able to play the dang thing anyway – the post notes that to “play at the level of detail shown in the screenshots and videos seen in this article, we recommend a GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics card,” even if there are ways to supposedly “ensure a great experience on previous-generation GPUs, too.” I don’t think I want to turn my PC into a jet engine for a 20 year old game, thanks very much.
The base version of Half-Life 2 actually got a pretty nice update last November for its 20th anniversary, which folded Episodes One and Two into the main package, and even fixed some old bugs. Cheers for that again, Valve.
Half-Life 2
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