Nvidia's Half-Life 2 Remaster Makes the Game Look Better Than Ever
Nvidia is helping community modders remaster Half-Life 2 with modern graphics — and so far, the results look stunning.
The company today debuted “Half-Life 2 RTX: an RTX Remix Project,” which will support full ray tracing to produce realistic shadows and lighting effects in the 19-year-old game.
The remaster will also feature support for the frame-rate boosting DLSS 3, along with redesigned game assets, such as desk lamps, enemies, and the main character’s iconic suit. The company published a video highlighting the drastic graphical uplift.
As you can see, the enhancements remove many of the blocky graphics found in the original game and replace them with realistic-looking textures and surfaces. The enemy headcrab also looks frighteningly real.
“In Half-Life 2 RTX, average world textures have 8X the pixels, and assets like the suit feature 20X the geometric detail of the original game,” Nvidia said in the announcement.
Nvidia is facilitating the remaster through RTX Remix, an upcoming free modding platform the company announced in September. The platform is designed to help community modders already working to upgrade classic games with modern visuals streamline the whole process.
In this case, the Half-Life 2 RTX remake is “being developed by four of Half-Life 2’s top mod teams, now working together under the banner of Orbifold Studios,” Nvidia says. The group’s goal is to remaster all of Half-Life 2’s game assets and then make them available for free.
“Using the latest version of RTX Remix, the modders are rebuilding materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties, adding extra geometric detail via Valve’s Hammer editor, and leveraging Nvidia technologies including full ray tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex,
Read more on pcmag.com
