Hands-on: Half-Life 2 with RTX-powered graphics looks gorgeous

Valve’s Half-Life 2 is still a wonderful milestone of PC gaming more than 20 years after its original release, but it recently got its dated visuals pumped up with a mod that lets you flex the power of a cutting-edge graphics card. In a video sponsored by Nvidia, PCWorld’s Adam goes through the new ray tracing and graphical enhancements and talks with the developers who implemented them.

Half-Life 2 RTX is a free upgrade if you already own the original (and after a million Steam sales, who doesn’t?), though you won’t get all the enhanced goodies unless you’re lucky enough to have an RTX 50-series card. We’re talking ray tracing and path tracing for incredible lighting, plus new in-game assets with more polygons and better textures so you have something nice for those rays to bounce off.

Naturally, this is going to make your gaming PC sweat a little more than the unmodified 20-year-old game. To help keep your fight against the Combine running smoothly, the updated game supports the latest version of DLSS, Multi Frame Generation, neural radiance caching, and a bunch of other newfangled tech.

Adam also got to speak with David Driver-Gomm, one of the lead developers of Orbifold Studios and project lead for HL2RTX. It’s a unique studio that’s come together through a handful of modder teams that were already working on Half-Life projects. They aren’t affiliated with Valve, but this is still an ostensibly approved mod for the game that even has its own Steam listing. So far, only the Ravenholm section of Half-Life 2 is completed with the new visuals in the demo, but eventually the team hopes to do the whole game.

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