Half-Life 2 RTX revealed & it looks even better than you think

Following on from Portal RTX, Nvidia has announced that fans intend to provide the same treatment to Valve’s seminal FPS, Half-Life 2.

The latest RTX remaster utilizing Nvidia’s suite of tools is going to be for Half-Life 2. However, a key factor here is that other than a presumed blessing from Valve, it’ll be entirely up to a group of modders to provide it.

The new group, Orbifold Studios, is entirely made up of the top modders in the Half-Life community right now.

Nvidia is actually putting out a call for modders to sign up and take part in the project. Utilizing the ‘Omniverse’ software, and RTX Remix, modify textures and extract models. The idea is that the RTX Remix tech will then apply an AI upscale over the top of these assets, to bring them up to modern standards.

It’ll also allow for improved illumination and more from light sources, as well as applying real-time ray tracing.

However, the fans and modders behind the project aren’t simply upscaling everything to modern standards. They’re going in and remastering materials and even adding additional detail into the world via Valve’s own Source Hammer tools. Hammer is what Valve uses to build their games, like Half-Life 2 and Alyx.

Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Project brings all of Nvidia’s tools to the table

Very little was shown of the Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Project, outside of a few screenshots from the laboratory sequence Red Letter Day. We got a good view of Dr. Kliener’s lab, with all the various tubes and light sources looking in tip-top shape.

Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Project will also support Reflex, Nvida’s new reactionary software to reduce input lag. It’ll also support RTX IO, Nvidia’s data decompression tech that alleviates the task off of the CPU for a faster output of data to the GPU. With all of the various inner workings and higher-resolution assets being added to the game, Half-Life 2 RTX will need all the help it can get.

There’s no release date for Half-Life 2 RTX right now, as the project has just begun.