Half-Life 2 RTX - Here's 40 Minutes of the Iconic FPS with Full Ray Tracing

Half-Life 2 RTX is a remaster and remake project from Orbifold Studios, a team of 100 modders, built with NVIDIA's impressive RTX Remix platform. In a nutshell, RTX Remix takes every scene and location from Valve's original Half-Life 2, transforms every material and surface into modern physically-based rendered (PBR) objects, and adds a suite of RTX technologies and AI tools to draw from, with the result being a fully ray-traced or path-traced version of a classic game that is now twenty years old.

Half-Life 2 RTX is a project we've been following closely for a few years, with early looks showcasing stunning and transformative results. With a fully playable demo now available for all GeForce RTX owners that includes two fully playable chapters from the game (Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt), we were given early access to the demo to get our first proper hands-on look at Half-Life 2 RTX.

Running on the GeForce RTX 5080, it's as impressive as we hoped it would be. Like all the best remasters and remakes that aim to stay faithful to the source material, Half-Life 2 RTX is like your fondest memories of the game brought to life with some of the most cutting-edge visuals ever seen in an interactive experience. It's like how you remember Half-Life 2 but with new assets and stunning ray-traced effects that only amplify and enhance what is still an all-timer.

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The magic trick here is that Orbifold Studios has taken just about everything you see in the Half-Life 2 RTX demo (some assets and effects have yet to be upgraded) has been painstakingly recreated with modern levels of detail without changing the look and feel of the source. Take a closer look at a barrel or canister or one of Grigori's traps in Ravenholm, and you'll notice so many new little details upon closer inspection that it's mind-blowing how things look the same while being completely different.

The team has painstakingly updated all textures, objects, and even characters while retaining the original art direction from Valve. In a way, this is standard remaster or remake stuff. But, once you add ray-tracing, RTX Neural Shaders, DLSS, and Multi Frame Generation, Half-Life 2 RTX delivers one of the most technically advanced and accomplished slices of gameplay you'll likely experience in 2025.

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Playing through the Ravenholm chapter and the previously creepy survival horror section from the original Half-Life 2 becomes genuinely unsettling as you see shadows react and move realistically - from headcrabs creeping towards you from behind or around a corner to a dim alleyway with crawling zombies looking like something from a horror film. Realistic and cinematic lighting, like what's on display here, is genuinely next-level stuff and one of the reasons you need a powerful GeForce RTX 40 or 50 Series GPU to run it all with a playable frame-rate.

Half-Life 2 RTX also includes brand-new RTX tech that we haven't seen in a game before. RTX Neural Radiance Cache is an AI neural shader that runs as you play the game. It not only improves performance but it leverages AI to simulate ray bounces to dramatically improve lighting, shadows, and other details you see. RTX Volumetrics delivers an endless stream of "wow" moments in Ravenholm because it allows for light to be accurately rendered in things like smoke and fog while creating accurate volumetric shadows. RTX Skin simulates how light penetrates the skin, which means you can see the translucent aspects of the many headcrab zombies you encounter, not to mention how things like veins and other soft stuff behave while basking in the glow of a nearby spotlight or fire. Yeah, it's kind of gross.

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Now, you could chalk up a lot of this as being a tech demo for RTX Remix and cutting-edge future tech that, right now, is only possible to achieve on the latest GeForce RTX hardware. However, as we're talking about a faithful recreation of Half-Life 2, with all of the same physics-based gameplay, sound, and music from the original, Half-Life 2 RTX is, first and foremost, a groundbreaking remake of one of the most beloved and acclaimed games ever made. One that remains remarkably faithful to the source material.

With that, we loved every minute of the two hours or so of gameplay we experienced with the Half-Life 2 RTX demo and cannot wait to replay the game in its entirety when the full mod/remake/remaster is released.