Half-Life 2 doesn't need improving upon, but I have to admit after a day of playing around in Orbifold Studio's visual remaster, I'm sold. Bashing boxes to smithereens as our good pal Gordon 'glasses' Freeman never looked so good.
I've been running around the demo for Half-Life 2 RTX, an unofficial and modder-led remaster of Half-Life 2 and built using Nvidia's RTX Remix modding platform. Valve knows about the project but has no involvement with it other than providing the original clay to be remoulded by the Orbifold team. The upcoming two-hour demo (which is available to play March 18) includes two levels to explore: the remains of Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt.
There are a few details that have stood out to me during my jaunt through Half-Life 2 RTX.
In Ravenholm, floodlights cast long shadows, including on small features like power boxes or window ledges stuck to walls. Even the vines climbing the walls of the old factories have been reworked, with leaves that cast individual shadows under the light from Gordon's flashlight. With lots of opportunities to launch sharp objects with the Gravity Gun, the shadow cast from each sawblade or cinder block as you whip them at a zombo's face is impressive.
Half-Life's most famous critter has received a '90s TV makeover, too. Headcrabs are aplenty in Ravenholm and these spindly lil' guys are much more fleshed out than the original game. Fleshed out is the correct term here, too. By using a ray-traced subsurface scattering technique, the team at Orbifold Studios has made it possible to gaze through the meaty legs of headcrabs. Nvidia calls it RTX Skin, which sounds as grotesque as its effect in-game.
The knock-on effect of such a tool is the humble headcrab now looks even more like a plucked chicken riding its human host like a ghoulish Ratatouille, but that doesn't make one any less offputting when you bump into one around a tight corner.
Nova Prospekt is where it's at, though. I'd recommend not skipping over it if you give the demo a try yourself. Possibly because I've seen Ravenholm at various points in the development cycle, including in-person at CES 2024, I found Nova Prospekt a little more impressive for showing off the revamped path tracing renderer within the RTX Remix runtime.
The automatic machine gun turrets flicker in green and blue as they track to targets and unleash hell, with each red hot round sending eruptions of dust and paint peeling from walls. The Combine parading around a half-abandoned prison look heaps better than the original—weirdly more human for their high quality uniforms—though they remain just as dumbfounded when Gordon crawls out of some random vent to smash them with a crowbar.
One of my highlights—as shown in the clip below—is when a super-heated bright orange bolt is fired from the crossbow, the orange glow traverses the world with the bolt to its final destination: a combine's torso.
Some textures still have that old-school look to them, such as some doors or floors, but it's all largely in keeping with the tone of the original. Overall, it's a smashing visual upgrade.
Though it's just as much about what has been preserved as what has been replaced. I played through both levels across Half-Life 2 and Half-life 2 RTX and it always felt like playing the same game. The charm is all still there, preserved in the grubby red barrels, supply boxes, and incredibly angular environments. The RTX version doesn't change the key details, it largely preserves them and buffs them up a bit. The same goes for the game's many weapons, which have been shined to the nines by Orbifold's team to better fit in with the world around them, but play all the same. There's still the same degree of HL2 jank to the gameplay.
What is RTX Remix?
So, what is actually going on under the hood with the RTX version? It's still the same Half-Life 2, in that the game is preserved under all the shiny new stuff, but the game's original rendering engine has been wholesale replaced by another. That's done with a tool called RTX Remix, which works on many DirectX 8/9 games.
RTX Remix has been available in open beta for a year now, but even before that it was hacked into some games by keen modders. Today marks its first official release out of beta.
It contains a few key parts, namely the Runtime and the Creator Toolkit.
The Runtime intercepts the game's original process, converts commands, and runs them within a new Physically Based Rendering renderer capable of wielding shiny new assets, new lighting system, and more. This opens the door to standardised, industry-wide file types and workflows to make things a little easier to work with. Think of it a little like converting an old car to a modern engine—the seats still have that same lump in the back, and it still drives slightly to the left, but put your foot down and it'll do 0-60 in 3 seconds.
The Creator Toolkit is the application for working with the new renderer, and allows developers to whip up new PBR-ready assets to adjust or replace the originals with. And then on top of that there's support for Nvidia's own features like RTX Neural Radiance Cache, which reportedly helps the lighting run 15% faster here; RTX Direct Illumination; RTX Volumetrics; and the aforementioned, and sorry I'm bringing it up again, RTX Skin.
The team of modders—developers/designers, really—over at Orbifold are using RTX Remix to allow for sweeping changes to assets, textures, and systems in Half-Life 2, which means they're no longer working with the Source engine so much as working directly with Remix. I've written about RTX Remix in greater detail previously, even speaking to a few of the developers over at Orbifold Studios about it, but it's a pretty painstaking process to go through each asset in a game and shape up a new one.
"Each and every asset we're taking the time to make sure we get right and that is time consuming," Chris Workman, founder of Orbifold told me a year ago now. "We have a backlog of several thousand assets to be done for Half-Life 2."
The team at Orbifold seemed pretty set on crafting everything by human hand, rather than using AI upscaling tools provided in RTX Remix. This, Workman told me, was to ensure the team could scrutinise "every single pixel to make sure we're hitting the exact same notes that the original designer intended."
From my time with these two levels, it feels like all that work to match ~vibes~ and ensure consistency has been worth the hassle. The game's eerily pretty.
Performance
And what about performance? I've been running the demo at 4K on a powerful gaming PC complete with AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Ventus 3X OC Plus, and 32 GB of 6,400 MT/s RAM, and even so, I only manage around 16 fps on average with the Ultra preset and most RTX features enabled. Ouch.
That goes up to around 40 - 50 fps with DLSS set to Auto, which tended to opt for a higher performance preset. Only with Frame Generation set to 4x mode did that shoot upwards of 150 fps and feel properly playable. All of which is to say this might hurt a little for those on older RTX graphics cards.
Running the game at lower resolutions or quality presets are a decent help, however. You can adjust the resolution in the Half-Life 2 settings menu, though for most of the impactful changes hit Alt + X to bring up the RTX Remix menu. The General tab offers quick tweaks to DLSS and Frame Generation, if supported, and the Rendering tab lets you drop the preset from Ultra through High, Medium, and Low.
On Low, at 1080p, my system was able to reach 75 fps on average in Ravenholm's opening scene, though this tends to drop with a lot happening on screen all at once. That's without DLSS or frame generation. With these settings and DLSS, maybe there's a little hope for older cards yet, but no doubt it's a demanding title to run with everything whacked up to 11.
Though that is what I'd like to do. Crank everything up to 11 and play through the entirety of Half-Life 2 RTX. Sadly, it's not ready yet, and there's still no release date for the full version of the game/mod/remaster. For now, only the demo awaits, and that's coming on March 18 if you want to give it a bash. You need both Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 RTX to run the game—the original Half-Life 2 package is just under 10 GB once installed, but Half-Life 2 RTX demands another 41 GB on top.
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