Half-Life 2 RTX demo drops March 18 with two hours of stunning full ray tracing gameplay

It's one of the most celebrated and acclaimed PC games ever made, and in 2025, Valve's Half-Life 2 is still a stone-cold classic. Half-Life 2 RTX, from Orbifold Studios, is one of the most ambitious and impressive mod projects for a PC gamer we've ever seen. The 100+ strong team of talented developers at Orbifold are using NVIDIA's groundbreaking RTX Remix toolkit to transform the iconic release. And a playable demo is dropping, next week, on March 18.

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RTX Remix, a modding tool that allows older titles to be remastered (or remixed) with new art, models, and full ray-traced visuals, is a game changer for the modding community. The result is Half-Life 2 reimagined with fully ray-traced visuals, groundbreaking RTX Neural Shaders, physically-based textures, new high-poly models of characters, enemies, and objects, and a whole lot more. Technically it's a remaster, but it looks like a built-from-the-ground-up remake.

The demo includes the survival-horror-like Ravenholm chapter from the game alongside the action-packed Nova Prospekt chapter. The build will fully support DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex, and the GeForce RTX 5090 delivers 265.7 FPS and the GeForce RTX 5080 delivers 163 FPS in 4K with DLSS 4. At 1440p, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti delivers 200.1 FPS and the GeForce RTX 5070 delivers 154.7 FPS with DLSS 4.

Half-Life 2 RTX is a free DLC for all Half-Life 2 owners on Steam.

Half-Life 2 RTX is designed to run well on all GeForce RTX 50 Series models, with NVIDIA confirming that RTX 40 Series and RTX 30 Series gamers can also play and enjoy the demo. It also features brand-new technology never seen in a game: RTX Neural Shaders and other technologies which will usher in a new era of PC gaming.

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RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) is a technology that allows millions, yes millions, of dynamic lights to be added to a game without impacting performance or straining system resources. RTX Neural Radiance Cache is a neural shader that improves lighting quality while improving performance. It's a neural network that runs as you play, analyzing a scene to calculate lighting with the power of AI - and the result is more accurate and responsive lighting and up to a 15% boost to performance in Half-Life 2 RTX.

RTX Volumetrics is a new technology that delivers realistic ray-traced fog effects. With this technology, ray-traced light beams now realistically scatter through air, fog, and smoke to add more realism and immersion to a scene. RTX Skin, is precisely as it sounds, it accurately simulates how light passes through skin and other surfaces to capture the "translucent quality of real skin" and "the subtle glow of light passing through flesh." In Half-Life 2 RTX, the headcrab zombies in Ravenholm will be much creepier thanks to RTX Skin.

As a demo, there will be some bugs and areas that haven't been appropriately remixed. We're keen to jump in after watching Half-Life 2's progress and even briefly going hands-on and hands-off with live demos. Stay tuned for our impressions, including footage captured on a GeForce RTX 5090.