Nvidia Anounces Half-Life 2 RTX (an rtx remix project by the community)

[Pup Shepard]

 

With the latest gforce driver update pushed out today.  A news article was posted talking how NVIDA has handed RTX remix over to "four of half-life 2s topp mod teams."  It will be interesting to see how this Ray Tracing project compares to many other that have come before it.  Digital foundry did a 4 way playthrough showing just such a previous mod.

 

 

source https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/half-life-2-rtx-remix-in-development/

[emosun]

Half Life II: The World Warrior

Half Life II: Champion Edition

Half Life II: Hyper Fighting

Super Half Life II: The New Challengers

Super Half Life II Turbo

Hyper Half Life II: The Anniversary Edition

Super Half Life II Turbo HD Remix

Ultra Half Life II: The Final Challengers

anything to avoid HL3

[Needfuldoer]

For everybody else who reflexively clicked the YouTube play button in that screenshot:

 

It's amazing how much of a difference modern lighting and textures make to aging games. I saw an RTX remix of a Need for Speed: Underground title, and it looked almost new. Black Mesa RTX when?

[leadeater]

I heard Half-Life 4 was coming out soon.

[emosun]

Just now, micha_vulpes said:

Why Make something new when you can keep milking a old IP for all its worth? Its been working for Bethesda for a decade
 

yeah and rockstar games

[SnugglyGirl]

This is one upgrade that will draw me back into half life 2. So funny they pretty much keep having the games redone over and over.

[da na]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

For everybody else who reflexively clicked the YouTube play button in that screenshot:

 

It's amazing how much of a difference modern lighting and textures makes to aging games. I saw an RTX remix of a Need for Speed: Underground title, and it looked almost new. Black Mesa RTX when?

To be fair, NFS Underground 2 still looks amazing sans-RTX. Lighting in that game is stellar

[Needfuldoer]

9 hours ago, micha_vulpes said:

A few tweaks with re-shade and it honestly looks like it could be a PS3/4 transition era game. Its a stellar looking game due to its artstyle.

It really does still look great. 

 

I could never master the controls, though. My hands have too much Gran Turismo in them to not reflexively countersteer into the automatic showy drifting.

[porina]

I got HL2 as part of Orange Box but hate to admit I never played through it. Once this comes out it might be the reason to revisit it.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Let's just hope it's not as much of an unoptimized mess as Portal RTX. Also, that trailer doesn't show much beyond one little scene of the game and even there, you can see telltale signs of a remaster that doesn't really care about adhering to the original aesthetic for the sake of pushing higher fidelity over actual artistry. 

[BetteBalterZen]

So, will this be a free update? 

[porina]

1 hour ago, BetteBalterZen said:

So, will this be a free update? 

If the follow the pattern set by Portal RTX it will be free to those who have HL2 on their Steam account.

[BetteBalterZen]

1 minute ago, porina said:

If the follow the pattern set by Portal RTX it will be free to those who have HL2 on their Steam account.

Would be pretty dope

[WereCat]

17 hours ago, emosun said:

Half Life II: The World Warrior

Half Life II: Champion Edition

Half Life II: Hyper Fighting

Super Half Life II: The New Challengers

Super Half Life II Turbo

Hyper Half Life II: The Anniversary Edition

Super Half Life II Turbo HD Remix

Ultra Half Life II: The Final Challengers

anything to avoid HL3

Half-Life: Alyx actually did progress further from HL2:EP2.... by 15 seconds... but still

[Forbidden Wafer]

17 hours ago, emosun said:

Half Life II: The World Warrior

Half Life II: Champion Edition

Half Life II: Hyper Fighting

Super Half Life II: The New Challengers

Super Half Life II Turbo

Hyper Half Life II: The Anniversary Edition

Super Half Life II Turbo HD Remix

Ultra Half Life II: The Final Challengers

anything to avoid HL3

 

 

[Kisai]

17 hours ago, Pup Shepard said:

 

With the latest gforce driver update pushed out today.  A news article was posted talking how NVIDA has handed RTX remix over to "four of half-life 2s topp mod teams."  It will be interesting to see how this Ray Tracing project compares to many other that have come before it.  Digital foundry did a 4 way playthrough showing just such a previous mod.

 

 

 

source https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/half-life-2-rtx-remix-in-development/

For those who didn't bother to take a look at how this actually works:

1. DXVK is used

2. Texture swapping/shader swapping is used.

 

There is no actual change to the game play, and it's actually possible to break the RTX mode if you change the settings.

 

So "RTX Remix" Portal, if anything is a mod on top of vanilla Portal. Portal is 4GB, RTX Remix is 23.6GB. Most of these substitution files are in /lss/gameReadyAssets inside PortalRTX

 

Which means that you can quite literately repeat this for HL2. There's nothing special going on that enables it.

[starsmine]

6 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Let's just hope it's not as much of an unoptimized mess as Portal RTX. Also, that trailer doesn't show much beyond one little scene of the game and even there, you can see telltale signs of a remaster that doesn't really care about adhering to the original aesthetic for the sake of pushing higher fidelity over actual artistry. 

We need to have better language around unoptimization.

Portal RTX isnt unoptimized, it's a feature playground of cranking it. You are always able as an end user to crank it to whatever.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Just now, starsmine said:

We need to have better language around unoptimization.

Portal RTX isnt unoptimized, it's a feature playground of cranking it. You are always able as an end user to crank it to whatever.

It is unoptimized. If a game can stutter to a crawl so hard that you can't even open a menu anymore to change the settings, that's what I consider a lack of optimization. This isn't about cranking the sliders and complaining that my hardware can't keep up an acceptable framerate. This is the software not being fit for purpose, something which decent QA would reveal. It also suffers from unacceptable slowdowns whenever it has to load a chunk of data mid-level.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

It is unoptimized.

The game is unchanged.

 

I think this is a problem people don't realize. Crying "it's unoptimized" doesn't mean that your toaster will someday be able to run it. 

 

In a real, remastering, of a game you'd tune the levels based on the GPU power. Since this is the original 15 year old game, and all the heavy lifting is done by DXVK and asset-substitution into the original game, there is no way to "tune" a level for toaster because it's one-size-fits-all.

4K, DLSS off, RTX 3090. 12GB VRAM used.

Setting it to Ultra with or without DLSS, makes it lag. However the difference between High and Ultra is 5% on the VRAM.

 

If I flip the settings on and off, it eventually drives VRAM free to 44%, therefor it uses 13GB of VRAM.

 

All on the menu/first stage.

 

This is not something that can be "optimized" to run on a toaster, because the nature of the "RTX Remix" doesn't come with with toaster quality textures.

 

We've seen this with Cyberpunk 2077 and Forespoken. It's simply not possible to have a good experience on a toaster, and demanding one is silly. The performance gap is too wide between a toaster of an iGPU/xx50/xx60 part and a x80/x90 part. Heck the RTX remix probably doesn't even work well on a RTX 3080 because the GPU memory isn't sufficient enough, where it might actually work on a 12GB 3060 if you run it at low settings.

 

[HenrySalayne]

On 8/23/2023 at 12:54 AM, Needfuldoer said:

For everybody else who reflexively clicked the YouTube play button in that screenshot:

 

It's amazing how much of a difference modern lighting and textures make to aging games. I saw an RTX remix of a Need for Speed: Underground title, and it looked almost new. Black Mesa RTX when?

I honestly think Half-Life 2 without RTX has aged really well. RTX adds geometry, texture resolution and better reflections, but the shading and lighting and the general look is still fantastic:

[SADS]

I see a whole bunch of model and texture updates too....

these seems to give more of an impression to the visual updates than RTX does?

i mean, sure, i love that the games getting a tasty update to maybe play through again with some awesome visual updates.

 

But, it's really not just from RTX. don't keep trying to oversell RTX NV.... it's still not worth the price hike

[AndreiArgeanu]

Spoiler

Watching the reviews of the Portal RTX with the crashing and performance issues doesn't give me that much hope.  Maybe this time it'll run well on mid range pc's. Looking at the trailer it doesn't seem yet to look quite as good as Black Mesa. Certain textures and models close up do look good but it doesn't look as well put together. Obviously it's early and they have time to improve, but I doubt this is going to be a definitive remaster.

 

Also I'm not really sure why they would go with the round about way of texture/shader swapping and using DXVK if that's what's being done. Source and Half Life 2 are pretty flexible and easy to edit. You can get the original map sources for HL2 and the Episodes and work on that and do something similar to what the Crowbar Collective has done but a remaster instead of a complete remake. Thinking about it, they're probably doing it to implement the stupid ray tracing. I'm not really sure DirectX 9 has any ray tracing support, and I don't think they can bring ray tracing into source, at least not easily. Source 2 does, but I highly doubt Valve would give their precious baby to the team.

 

You can only really get access to Source 2 SDK through CS2, HL Alyx and other titles, but you don't have access to the full set, and I don't think you're allowed to publish games with those tools. They're different for every game. Valve has ported various Source maps from CS GO to CS2, so obviously a similar process can be completed for HL2 as well.