It's Finally Here! - Half-Life 2 RTX Demo Hands On

[Plouffe]

Nvidia's RTX Remix is a powerful tool, but it still takes developers and modders a lot of work to visually modernize old games with it. Orbifold Studio has been hard at work creating Half-Life 2 RTX, and the demo is finally here! How does it look compared to the original?

 

 

[strange13930]

Amazing, I hope one day Nintendo makes a way to play switch games on pc.

[iLikeBananas]

I honestly don’t get why everyone considers Half-Life 2 one of the best games ever or why there’s so much hype for Half-Life 3. I grew up playing Half-Life, and while it was fun, I don’t think it has much replayability. What I really loved was the multiplayer... mainly because of the difficult movement mechanics and because I enjoy arena shooters in general.

 

Even though I was a big Half-Life fan, Half-Life 2 always felt a bit empty and boring to me, and I thought the multiplayer was a huge downgrade. The new weapons made sense for the single-player campaign, but in multiplayer, they just didn’t feel right. To me, HL2’s multiplayer was basically a worse version of Call of Duty—everyone just ran around with the same assault rifle, and there wasn’t much variety beyond that. I don’t see any value in a Half-Life 2 RTX at all. 

 

I’m way more excited for Left 4 Dead 3. L4D2 had an amazing Versus mode thanks to its high skill ceiling, but I’m a bit worried that Valve will mess up L4D3. Honestly, I think L4D2 turned out great more by coincidence than because Valve really knew what they were doing. My reasoning? They basically patched Follow the Liter out of the game, and that mode (especially on No Mercy - Rooftop) was my absolute favorite part of L4D2.

 

I’m also concerned because of Valve’s current stance on modding. Back in L4D2, modding was incredibly innovative and easy—you didn’t have to mess with game files manually. Custom content came in .vpk files that you just dropped into the mod folder. The best part? If you wanted to join a server that didn’t allow mods, the game would automatically reset to vanilla. In newer Valve games like CS:GO, that’s no longer the case. You can install mods, sure, but if you have them enabled, you’re completely blocked from joining servers that don’t allow them. It won’t just revert to default like in L4D2. That makes me worried that L4D3 will limit modding entirely and instead be packed with microtransactions and battle passes.

[Blasty Blosty]

25 minutes ago, iLikeBananas said:

I honestly don’t get why everyone considers Half-Life 2 one of the best games ever or why there’s so much hype for Half-Life 3. I grew up playing Half-Life, and while it was fun, I don’t think it has much replayability. What I really loved was the multiplayer... mainly because of the difficult movement mechanics and because I enjoy arena shooters in general.

To me it set the standard for all FPS games moving forward, from the lack of in-your-face tutorials to the length of a good campaign. I find it hella replayable, I'm on my like 10th replay of the game currently.

 

26 minutes ago, iLikeBananas said:

Even though I was a big Half-Life fan, Half-Life 2 always felt a bit empty and boring to me, and I thought the multiplayer was a huge downgrade. The new weapons made sense for the single-player campaign, but in multiplayer, they just didn’t feel right. To me, HL2’s multiplayer was basically a worse version of Call of Duty—everyone just ran around with the same assault rifle, and there wasn’t much variety beyond that. I don’t see any value in a Half-Life 2 RTX at all. 

Yeah, HL2 DM was definitely an afterthought

[RejZoR]

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the enhancements ray tracing brings, but at what cost? I'd honestly rather play a mostly raster based remaster/remake of Half-Life 2 the way Black Mesa remastered the original Half-Life using latest Source Engine. Visuals and art direction was just mind blowing to a point it's almost hard to say it's the same game even though it still is in every way. It also helps that it's running on highly enhanced version of Source Engine that was powering HL2: Episode 2. The engine has matured dramatically

 

Just an example, but anyone who played Black Mesa knows how massive upgrade was to the original.

 

EDIT:

Just found out there is Black Mesa: Blue Shift (Blue Shift) in the works and still kicking, currently at Chapter 5 out of 8 that are playable from modDB and also Operation: Black Mesa that will remaster Opposing Force.

 

If anyone wants, you can slap ReShade with RTGI to get screen space ray tracing on these games and more...

[smcoakley]

35 minutes ago, iLikeBananas said:

I honestly don’t get why everyone considers Half-Life 2 one of the best games ever or why there’s so much hype for Half-Life 3. I grew up playing Half-Life, and while it was fun, I don’t think it has much replayability. What I really loved was the multiplayer... mainly because of the difficult movement mechanics and because I enjoy arena shooters in general.

 

Even though I was a big Half-Life fan, Half-Life 2 always felt a bit empty and boring to me, and I thought the multiplayer was a huge downgrade. The new weapons made sense for the single-player campaign, but in multiplayer, they just didn’t feel right. To me, HL2’s multiplayer was basically a worse version of Call of Duty—everyone just ran around with the same assault rifle, and there wasn’t much variety beyond that. I don’t see any value in a Half-Life 2 RTX at all. 

I don't care about multiplayer. So I guess coming from a multiplayer perspective, I can understand that opinion.

 

In my opinion, Half-Life and Halo together leapfrogged an entire class of genre in what it could be and what it was possible to do from a single-player perspective. First, Half-Life was really groundbreaking in its focus on narrative and environmental storytelling. The environment itself is constantly telling a story, and has characters saying and doing things integrated into the gameplay without cutscenes. It is common now (though not as common as it should be, IMO), but that simply wasn't ever done before at the scale and level of detail of Half-Life.

 

Then after that, Halo took what Half-Life brought to the table and ran with it, with even greater story emphasis, greater detail, and admittedly more mass appeal. It's hard to understate what impact Halo had on the genre of shooting games, though really it was Half-Life that tilled the soil in my opinion.

 

So why Half-Life 2? Well, Half-Life 2 further evolved the genre again, but naturally in different ways. After all, the things that Half-Life and Halo introduced were already done before. What Half-Life 2 did was a little more technical. Firstly, it was a great looking game. Like, really great. The average graphics fidelity of video games were like 5 years behind what Half-Life 2 was doing. And this was more than just technical graphics (though that was a big achievement too), but the amount of detail put into the environment and put onto every object. Every level was just full of stuff, like real life.

 

Sure, graphics is something that is less timeless of an achievement than things like gameplay or narrative as it ages, but at least in my opinion, it still impresses me today how Half-Life 2 looks just "old" and not "super old" as it actually is.

 

The other aspect is gameplay -- Half-Life 2 actually laid a lot of the groundwork I think for the kinds of puzzle designs that of course later you see in Portal and other games. But Half-Life 2 is arguably an excellent puzzle game wearing an FPS trench coat. What Valve brought to the table was to make a really good physics engine (by the standard of the time) and then dare to just let the player interact with the world physically with very little restrictions. Core gameplay required to progress relied on the physics engine working correctly, and you knowing how to use your brain to use it. This dare by Valve was super uncommon at the time, and truth be told, its still pretty uncommon.

[RejZoR]

Halo is the most overrated game I've ever seen in my life. Everyone is hyping it and it was terrible and repetitive. Level design was boring and repetitive to a point devs just used copy & paste to make levels and I still hate them for it. And it's not just the Library segment, most of the game was so boring and forgettable I can't really remember much of it. Meanwhile I can close my eyes and narrate you through a novel of entire Half-Life franchise, System Shock franchise, Deus Ex franchise down to most obscure details that I remembered for decades.

 

I even wanted to give halo another chance when they released anniversary remaster or whatever it was just to be greeted by horrifying pixelated mess that looked worse than Half-Life 1 back in the day. And it wasn't even issue with hardware, it was designed to have checkerboard pixelated shadows and blocky shading. I've uninstalled and refunded it in half an hour time.

 

Comparing Halo to Half-Life is what I consider an insult.

[pApA^LeGBa]

I´d like to know if RTX can be turned off. I would like the new textures but i don´t care about RTX.

 

The claim that 90% use DLSS is probably just another marketing lie from Nvidia. We have like 20 people on our private discord and no one uses it. Small example but still.

[manikyath]

2 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

 

The claim that 90% use DLSS is probably just another marketing lie from Nvidia. We have like 20 people on our private discord and no one uses it. Small example but still.

90% of users never changed their settings from default in the games that support it...

 

you can make numbers say anything if you add enough filters.

[Brian McKee]

Did anyone else notice that some textures are just missing a ton of details in the RTX version? Game feel is just so different, and I don't think for the better.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

7 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I'd honestly rather play a mostly raster based remaster/remake of Half-Life 2 the way Black Mesa remastered the original Half-Life using latest Source Engine. Visuals and art direction was just mind blowing to a point it's almost hard to say it's the same game even though it still is in every way. It also helps that it's running on highly enhanced version of Source Engine that was powering HL2: Episode 2. The engine has matured dramatically

I agree. For everyone who hasn't played the original Half Life, wants to give it a shot but dislikes the old graphics, please give Black Mesa a shot.

 

Not only does it look much better, it is a 1 for 1 recreation of HL1, though with some changes to a few areas to improve the overall experience. A very tedious puzzle section was shortened I believe, a few physics puzzles added, and most importantly the attrocious endgame (Valve admitted they ran out of time and money and threw this together last minute) is completely overhauled and improved.

 

I hope Remix and other tools make more projects like Black Mesa possible, instead of just giving old games a new coat of AI paint.

8 hours ago, iLikeBananas said:

honestly don’t get why everyone considers Half-Life 2 one of the best games ever or why there’s so much hype for Half-Life 3. I grew up playing Half-Life, and while it was fun, I don’t think it has much replayability. What I really loved was the multiplayer... mainly because of the difficult movement mechanics and because I enjoy arena shooters in general.

I don't know, maybe it is just different tastes. But I loved HL and HL2 for the story, vibe and atmosphere in the single player campaigns. I played through both dozens of times over the years I believe. HL3 was and is just so hyped because there are so many loose story threads still hanging, plus HL games usually really pushed single player shooters forward quite a bit in terms of technical and gameplay innovation.

 

But if you look at it mostly from the arena shooter angle, then I can definitely see how HL2 was a let down. But I think after UT2004 there was nothing advancing that genre anymore. At least not to my knowledge, admittedly I checked out of online shooters when progression etc. became a thing everywhere after BF2 I believe.

[jordanbuilds1]

7 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Halo is the most overrated game I've ever seen in my life. Everyone is hyping it and it was terrible and repetitive. Level design was boring and repetitive to a point devs just used copy & paste to make levels and I still hate them for it. And it's not just the Library segment, most of the game was so boring and forgettable I can't really remember much of it. Meanwhile I can close my eyes and narrate you through a novel of entire Half-Life franchise, System Shock franchise, Deus Ex franchise down to most obscure details that I remembered for decades.

 

I even wanted to give halo another chance when they released anniversary remaster or whatever it was just to be greeted by horrifying pixelated mess that looked worse than Half-Life 1 back in the day. And it wasn't even issue with hardware, it was designed to have checkerboard pixelated shadows and blocky shading. I've uninstalled and refunded it in half an hour time.

 

Comparing Halo to Half-Life is what I consider an insult.

Overrated, but still good

[Psittac]

How would an RX 7900 xtx do on this game? cpu is 9900x.

[Senzelian]

Nice, they made a good game look almost as good as some 2013 games, but it now runs like a 2027 UE5 title. 

[Kisai]

17 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I´d like to know if RTX can be turned off. I would like the new textures but i don´t care about RTX.

 

The claim that 90% use DLSS is probably just another marketing lie from Nvidia. We have like 20 people on our private discord and no one uses it. Small example but still.

Probably because it's a the default setting in some games that are DLSS aware, but so far I've seen more games default to FSR, not DLSS. Starfield defaults to FSR, and UE5 games default to FSR, but don't turn FSR on by default unless the developer changes it. 

 

I'd assume, that the reason why "90% use DLSS" is really "90% don't realize DLSS is turned on"

[smcoakley]

15 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

I agree. For everyone who hasn't played the original Half Life, wants to give it a shot but dislikes the old graphics, please give Black Mesa a shot.

I'm glad that things like Black Mesa exist to bring a classic game to new gamers.

 

But I gotta be honest... I don't understand people who can't play a game with old graphics. I don't get what's going on in these people's heads. Like, "Yeah yeah, the story is great, the gameplay is amazing, the sound design is masterful, but the graphics are old so I am physically incapable of playing it. Too bad." It just doesn't compute for me.

 

I'm not saying that remakes for old games with updated graphics are bad; I like modern graphics as much as the next guy. I think if done well, they can only enhance the experience of the original. But requiring a updated graphics to be able to play?

[AndrewAsd]

Didn't really expect much of this release. Lots of wasted performance just for a mediocre attempt at justifying ray tracing as per usual. I don't know why they bother anymore, the lighting doesn't seem any better than people like the Crowbar Collective have got out of the source engine with Black Mesa and the perfomance is abysmal. Shame of the hard work people put into making models for the game.

[atxcyclist]

On 3/18/2025 at 11:52 AM, RejZoR said:

Halo is the most overrated game I've ever seen in my life. Everyone is hyping it and it was terrible and repetitive. Level design was boring and repetitive to a point devs just used copy & paste to make levels and I still hate them for it. And it's not just the Library segment, most of the game was so boring and forgettable I can't really remember much of it. Meanwhile I can close my eyes and narrate you through a novel of entire Half-Life franchise, System Shock franchise, Deus Ex franchise down to most obscure details that I remembered for decades.

 

I even wanted to give halo another chance when they released anniversary remaster or whatever it was just to be greeted by horrifying pixelated mess that looked worse than Half-Life 1 back in the day. And it wasn't even issue with hardware, it was designed to have checkerboard pixelated shadows and blocky shading. I've uninstalled and refunded it in half an hour time.

 

Comparing Halo to Half-Life is what I consider an insult.

Halo’s biggest strength was the multiplayer, because for many, Halo was the first multiplayer console game they played. Yes there was Unreal Tournament 99 before it, but OG PS2 consoles didn’t have any communications port to do multiplayer, and the Dreamcast was dialup-only without an extremely rare Ethernet attachment and it never supported LAN gaming. Of course there was Goldeneye before that, but you need some very rose-tinted glasses to look at Goldeneye multiplayer fondly; The controls are cumbersome at best, and split screen on anything but a huge rear-projection TV would have been terrible too.

 

Half-Life is amazing because of the physics engine, the story is just so-so when you get down to it, and Team Fortress and Counter-Strike were completely different games if you wanted multiplayer. I still think TF2, if it were not for all the bots and hackers, could still be an amazing multiplayer game even today, but because of the aforementioned problems I haven’t played it in years. CS2 is obviously popular with old gamers and it doesn’t have the flashiness or interest of Fortnite or any of the other new shooter games, but I still find myself playing it occasionally.

[MC.Morrado]

There needs to be a Half-Life mod that replaces Snarks with chihuahuas. Here's an old picture of me holding my mom's old chihuahua like a burrito, or how Gordon Freeman would hold a Snark in one hand.

 

These ankle biting little hell-spawn weigh less than a Big Gulp and bark almost 24/7 at anything they don't know. I'm pretty sure they would be extinct already if it weren't for humans keeping them as pets. There's gotta be a mod to replace Snarks with a pack of chihuahuas; except the chihuahuas would do more damage.

[atxcyclist]

Is anyone playing this demo, does it still run like trash on a 3060 Ti?

 

EDIT: Can confirm, runs like trash.

[ewitte]

On 3/18/2025 at 1:21 PM, pApA^LeGBa said:

I´d like to know if RTX can be turned off. I would like the new textures but i don´t care about RTX.

 

The claim that 90% use DLSS is probably just another marketing lie from Nvidia. We have like 20 people on our private discord and no one uses it. Small example but still.

Why not?  I can understand FG hate, but up sampling is just free performance at this point and actually makes poor TAA implementations look better.  I turn it on with pretty much everything on a 4090.