Following on from its brilliant work on Portal RTX, Nvidia has created another stunning remaster with Half-Life 2 RTX. Bringing raytracing and new assets into Valve’s already amazing PC classic, the Half-Life sequel has been given a brilliant new coat of paint.
Revealed by Nvidia in a YouTube trailer, the new remaster uses the company’s RTX REMIX technology to easily inject ray-traced lighting, shadows, ambient occlusion and more. While Half-Life 3 may never come out, fans may be happy with this return to the second game.
In the short one-minute trailer, Nvidia shows a stunning return to the early areas of Half-Life 2. While we only get a look at the small lab area from the game, the remaster work already looks phenomenal and mostly keeps with the style of the original as well.
Of course, there will always be some negatives with any remaster. While mostly faithful, Half-Life 2 RTX does seem to remove some of the original game’s colour, washing some of the areas out in comparison to the orange-hued OG release. Nevertheless, it’s an impressive effort, and one that should take a lot less time than the Half-Life 1 remake Black Mesa.
RTX Remix does have the potential to bring many believer PC games back to modern life with brand new visuals. In the past, Nvidia has shown demos for Morrowind running with the tech, bringing Vvardenfell into the modern age with a more accurate look than The Elder Scrolls Online did. Future games using the technology could be even better.
Unfortunately, Half-Life 2 RTX is currently without a release date. In fact, the game’s announcement simply claims that its in development.If it follows the release structure of Portal RTX, the game will be a PC only game, and a free upgrade for all original HL2 owners.
While Half-Life 2 RTX will be playable on AMD hardware, it likely will only run well on Nvidia cards. Furthermore, the game’s DLSS support will only be usable on Nvidia GPUs.
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