Half-Life 2 RTX Lights Up City 17 With Full Ray Tracing

Half-Life 2 is getting the RTX treatment, with a new community-made remaster that will add full ray tracing to the classic first-person shooter.

As part of a new reveal from Nvidia showing off AI-enhanced real-time ray tracing using DLSS 3.5, Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project was announced. The project uses the same modding tools that spun off from last year's Portal with RTX, and is being developed by "four of Half-Life 2’s top mod teams, now working together under the banner of Orbifold Studios," according to a blog post about it.

"As with the Portal projects, almost every asset is being reconstructed in high fidelity, and full ray tracing (otherwise known as path tracing) is being leveraged to bring cutting-edge graphics to Half-Life 2. In Half-Life 2 RTX, average world textures have eight times the pixels, and assets like the suit feature 20 times the geometric detail of the original game. You can now see the fabric weavings around the joints of the suit, and the interplay of plastics and metals that compose the chest, leg, and arm pieces."

It's noted in the blog post that even props are "transformed with full ray tracing, like the magnification lens on Kleiner’s desk, which used shaders in 2004 to depict a low resolution reflection of the world. Now, the magnifying glass contains a curved lens that realistically refracts light and bends every reflection, heightening immersion." If you head to the website there's a useful slider the lets you switch between what the original game looks like with RTX off, and with RTX on, and there's a notable difference in how light works between the two versions.

The reveal trailer, as seen above, didn't provide a release date for the project, simply noting that it's currently in development, so don't expect to be able to play it any time soon.