Half-Life 2 RTX (opens in new tab)

It reminds me of the Alan Parsons quote "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment"

The original aesthetic, including lighting, was made keeping the original limitations in minds. Kind of running old sprite games on LCDs instead of CRTs makes them look jagged.

So it's different and a tech demo, but I agree it's not necessarily better and could be one the reasons it is free.

I thought exactly the same things about the illumination, i feel like it's too much "look how cool rtx is" and not enough "this should be scary and dark". In this, and other demos, i also felt like refractions are exaggerated, like floors that seem like mirrors is not really realistic to the end user. Sometimes it reminds me of when hdr pics came out and everyone was overdoing it. (But it should be a settings problem more than anything else!)

With ray tracing Nvidia made a new technology that breaks everyone's PC performance then they sold the solution to that broken performance as a card upgrade with better ray tracing hardware. Even though the Ray tracing doesn't necessarily look any better, just different, we now have to upgrade cards to solve the broken PC performance Nvidia caused themselves...

I think A/B viewing is throwing you off. It looks great when you actually play it.

I actually like it; but I think the point is more to demonstrate cool tech than to be true to Half Life's mood. It kind of reminds me of when in the 90s games started supporting colored lightings, and briefly everything was uh, very colorful. Although I think this is a lot more tasteful than that!

Can someone who has played it tell me if they really lit up most/all of Ravenholm like this or if they are just showing us a few lights cranked to 12 in the promotional material?

Most video games allow for configuring brightness right at the start.

My impression is that they were more interested in showing the improvements than being faithful to the original atmosphere.

Some of the new scenes are just too damn bright, but the few that preserved the atmosphere looked really good in the trailer.

Could be a factor of settings--I wonder if they just bumped the brightness to emphasize the differences, especially for a tiny video.

I don't understand why they made everything have that weird sickly yellow cast. It's so weird.

On the contrary I find OG HL2 to be one of the ugliest games of all time. It's so dark and gray and flat.

Personally, the two most alluring things about RTX for me is a) better global illumination, none of that silly "you can see sunrise shining through the mountain/cave's ceiling" stuff; b) better local illumination: a glowing object should be an actual light source and make its surroundings brighter, dammit.

Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.

While I think the ray-traced version looks better in a technical sense, it seems to me that they have completely forgotten to apply darkness and shadow appropriately in the scenes to create an immersive atmosphere.

Keep all the new tech and dial the ambient lighting down. That would look way better.

Make it feel dark, uncertain and risky again. You’re not supposed to know what’s in that corner or that room before it comes lounging at you.

In the RTX version you can see everything in every location, completely killing any sense of suspense.

I'm not a fan of graphics mods, but there is a similar problem with fan made RPG mods that "bring a game up to date with the technology" (wide screen, qol etc). A lot of mod packs feel like they have to add content (characters, quests) that is not so likely to fit in with the original game just because they can.

At least in Gibberlings mod packs for the infinity engine games the extra content is non existing or optional...

It matters that the original lighting was carefully hand-crafted by (presumably) environment artists and level designers working with strict limitations. What couldn’t be rendered was faked.

But yeah, I tend to find RTX a massive waste of framerate for little practical gain.

Hm, have I watched the same video? Most of the difference I saw on the floors is lighting and shadows, the only case where the floor was really "shiny" was a tiled floor, and that is actually reflective in real life, so...

But Ravenholm loses some of its scare-factor due to that.

But this is sooooo shiny!

hahaha

This is mostly a consequence of designing the ambiance using the tools of the time. You really need someone to go in and relight every environment with RTX in mind now, to properly take advantage of the capabilities.

I had a similar experience when I bought an OLED gaming monitor. It has perfect black, but when you go to play any game, they've all been lit assuming LCD screens, so blacks are really grey and the superior OLED contrast is basically useless.

Simply inserting the new tech isnt enough. The games need a redesign incorporating these new technological capabilities.

Related:

Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Developers Respond to Concern From Some Fans That It Ruins the Original Game's Atmosphere

https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-2-rtx-remix-developer...

Most games allow you to adjust brightness. I assume the brightness can be turned down to get closer to the original lighting and mood... I hope.

I thought its mood was more fun grav-killbox. Relative to contemporary games and sections re scare factor.

Yes, way too bright. The ray tracing is great but couldn't they have reduced the source brightness?

Lighting demo gonna lighting.

I wouldn't say I prefer it. There are a ton of top tier modern games. But you are right that there is this persistent blurriness. I have no clue what it is but it just looks super ugly and the result is for me that even some 10 year old game in effect do look better...

HL1 is a very different experience compared to HL2. If you haven't played through HL2 I would still give that a shot. I love both games, but the second one was a lot more polished.

>I tried HL1 after that, but couldn't really get into it.

Try Black Mesa. It's a modern remake but very true to the original.

Half-Life 1 was groundbreaking but still very much of its era. Half-Life 2 feels like a modern game, though.

Try Black Mesa instead of HL1, it's HL1 rebuild in source engine by fans.

> the RTX Remix application lets modders drag and drop lights, move objects, copy-paste existing objects into a scene to increase clutter and grass coverage, convert lights to be fully ray-traced, AI enhance textures, and add DLSS to improve image quality and accelerate performance.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-half-lif...

According to one of the Steam reviews, it ran horrible on RTX 4070 due to insufficient VRAM. The trailer shows FPS counter with 4x framegen, which is exclusive to 50xx series, also most likely relies on Nvidia upscaling. I wouldn't be too optimistic for AMD GPUs here

Doesn't directly answer your question as I don't have a modern AMD card to test with, but even with an RTX 5080 Super + 9800X3D, I was still only getting about ~45-55 FPS at 4K60. I left the default settings of High and DLSS enabled (Ultra was slower). Turning off DLSS tanked the FPS to like ~15-20 and ate up almost the full 16GB of VRAM.

Even so, it was still really cool to experience and was plenty playable as-is. I'm excited to see the full release.

I tried Portal RTX on a 9070 XT and got 20 FPS at full resolution (no frame generation). There’s no driver limitations, but I have no idea what the expected FPS is

I tested with an RX 7900 XTX on Fedora/Proton for ~5 minutes at the start of Ravenholm. My FPS counter was consistently over 50 once all the assets were loaded, but the image was extremely blurry. I don't know the cause and I couldn't find an obvious way to fix it. The framerate was fine, but the blur made it unplayable. I don't know if that issue translates to other AMD GPUs.

You need RT-capable cards and minimum 3060Ti or equivalent.

You're not going to have a good time with a RX6600

According to the reporting on GamingOnLinux, it works. Haven't tried it myself yet.

There's a lot of rumours flying around that HL3 might be coming soonish, and when it arrives it'll almost certainly support RTX. It's also possible that it'll be built on an evolution of the HL2 engine. If so, it might have been seen as a useful development and marketing exercise to backport the RTX changes to the older HL2 engine version.

Also hobbies. Not every activity has to be for monetary gain. Or full time for that matter.

Maybe not in this case, which may be a paid for nvidia ad. But in the case of a lot of mod/remakes, yes, they're done for free.

I would assume that nVidia financed this as a tech demo for their stuff. They did a similar thing with Quake 2 RTX a few years back.

Definitely possible, but probably not easily. The "easiest" remastering I've seen simply upscales textures to 2K or 4K which provides an inexpensive way to resharpen old games without losing too much of their original look.

For this HL2 RTX mod though, my understanding is they had to add all new lighting sources to hopefully match the original intent, and looks like they remodeled many items and actors too.

It's a mod, not made by Valve. Also there are rumors that new HL game is coming this year (or in next 25 years).

https://x.com/mikeshapiroland/status/1874213952680607922

That's G-Man voice actor.