Half-Life 2 RTX, remastered with ray tracing graphics, comes as a mod

Half life 2the popular first-person shooter from Valve, is getting a remaster in the form of a mod that will add ray-tracing graphics to the game, Nvidia announced Tuesday ahead of Gamescom 2023.

Bring cutting edge visuals to Half life 2 It’s a fitting upgrade to the game, which itself offered amazing technical advancements for its time, including realistic physics simulation that was incorporated into the gameplay via elements like the Gravity Gun. There’s no word yet on whether this mod will arrive in time for the game’s 20th anniversary, which falls roughly 15 months from now in November 2024. Nvidia warned of this development at Half-Life 2 RTX: The RTX Remix ProjectThe project, as the project is known, has “just begun”.

Half life 2 rtx Follow in my footsteps Gateway with RTXwhich was released in December 2022. Gateway with RTX Made by Nvidia’s in-house Lightspeed Studios team using RTX Remix, a modding platform designed to allow modders to create remastered versions of classic ray-tracing games more easily. RTX Remix – which Nvidia announced in September 2022 – is not yet publicly available, but the company has granted early access to four of its best games. Half life 2 Editing teams, working together on editing under the Orbifold Studios banner.

When asked to clarify whether Nvidia was paying people working on this project, a company representative told Polygon that Nvidia “is not at liberty to discuss commercial relationships.” Available evidence indicates that development is on a voluntary basis: functionally this is a model for Half life 2, and are made by modders familiar with the game, rather than Lightspeed Studios or Valve. In fact, Orbifold Studios is looking forward to inviting the entire modding community along Join the effort to build Half life 2 rtxNvidia said in a press release. We’ve also reached out to the four teams that make up Orbifold Studios — Project 17, Half-life 2 origins remastered, Half-Life 2 VRAnd Level Up: Replay — to request additional details, and we will update this article when we receive a response.

retina display

We got a glimpse Half life 2 rtx At a press conference last week. Nvidia ran a trailer for the remaster, though it didn’t show much — the camera simply panned across two versions of Dr. Isaac Kleiner’s lab, one with ray tracing disabled and one with ray tracing enabled.

As a project based on RTX Remix, Half life 2 rtx It will showcase Nvidia’s proprietary graphics and performance optimization technologies, such as Deep Learning Super Samping (DLSS) 3, Reflex, and RTX IO. The visual upgrades being developed for the remaster — which you can see in the six pairs of screenshots Nvidia released alongside Tuesday’s announcement — include textures reconstructed using physical rendering (so they accurately absorb, reflect and refract light), and additional engineering details. average stature in Half life 2 rtx It has eight times as many pixels as the original game, and items like Gordon Freeman’s HEV suit contain 20 times the engineering detail, according to Nvidia. Of course, you will need a game from 2004 a lot An additional detail if the textures and text in the world would look good in 4K, as seen in these screenshots. (Look at all those words now legible on Kleiner’s CRT monitors!)

With all these promotions in store Half life 2 rtxAnother big question that PC gamers have is whether their PC will be able to run the game. Our reviewer needed an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, with DLSS enabled, to get “something close to reliable performance” in Gateway with RTX 4K resolution. And the content of the Almost 12,000 reviews on Steam Because the game is mixed, with the vast majority of negative reviews coming from people complaining about the very tough system requirements. (An Nvidia representative confirmed this to Polygon Half life 2 rtxLikes Gateway with RTX Before that, it would be compatible with any ray-tracing-capable GPU—though Nvidia-exclusive features like DLSS would require an Nvidia GPU, of course.)

One Nvidia upgrade it Half life 2 rtx The next version of DLSS, the company’s proprietary image reconstruction technology, which uses a variety of techniques to improve image quality while maintaining high performance, will not be supported. DLSS 3.5, which Nvidia also announced Tuesday, builds on existing features of ultra-high resolution and frame generation with a new component called ray reconstruction.

Ray reconstruction works on a key part of the ray tracing pipeline: noise reduction, which fills in missing pixels by sampling light rays across multiple frames of the game. The current denoising step provides adequate results, but the nature of the process removes details in the final image, causing problems such as inaccurate lighting effects. DLSS 3.5 uses AI-assisted beam reconstruction to do a better job, making it so that, for example, the headlights will cast a precise, directional beam in front of the front end of the vehicle, rather than scattering it at a dotted point surrounding the vehicle.

During the press conference, Nvidia showed a clip of this in action illusory freedomthe next expansion of Cyberpunk 2077, which will support DLSS 3.5 when it launches on September 26th. Other titles coming soon with DLSS 3.5 support include Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2which was slightly delayed until October 27, and Gateway with RTX.

Most importantly, DLSS 3.5 will work with all Nvidia RTX GPUs going back to the first generation of RTX 20 series cards, which will be 5 years old. This is a nice change from the typical trend: the frame generation technology in DLSS 3 requires one of the company’s newest cards, the RTX 40-series GPUs.