Half-Life 2 RTX news: HEV suit has 34x more polygons than original version

If there's something I'm actually excited to when it comes to graphics in PC games over the next few months or so, the first would have to be Alan Wake 2 from Remedy, which has a bunch of the very latest NVIDIA RTX features... but then there's Half-Life 2 RTX that has my attention to. Check out the trailer:

If you haven't read into Half-Life 2 RTX, it's a modding project that was announced by NVIDIA and Orbifold Studios with RTX Remix. Orbifold Studios is a team of developers that worked on the likes of Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, as well as Raising the Bar: Redx.

But as of the last 24 hours or so, there are some great updates on Half-Life 2 RTX and what we can expect in terms of graphical updates over the original (and one of my top 5 games of all time) Half-Life 2. In a new video interview hosted by Lambda Generation on YouTube, who talked with "Kralich" who is working on Half-Life 2 RTX and had previously worked on Raising the Bar: Redux and Portal: Prelude RTX.

Kralich teased that the HEV suit in Half-Life 2 RTX has 34x more polygons than the original HEV suit. We're talking about 2800 polygons in the original HEV suit in Half-Life 2 versus an incredible 95,000 polygons in Half-Life 2 RTX. The head crab has also exploded in detail: 1690 polygons up to a huge 49,668 polygons in Half-Life 2 RTX, which represents a huge 30x increase in detail.

The interview also reveals some awesome little facts that you should know: Valve gave their blessing for Half-Life 2 RTX... that is really awesome to know, as well as the fact that Valve is being kept in the loop of the development of the project but is hands-off in terms of the development influence.

NVIDIA is helping with engineering support...well, this is an RTX title, so that makes sense, but it's also great to know NVIDIA is invested in this in a bigger role. Textures being remade by hand is something I love to hear, and I hope the littlest of touches are applied... the world of Half-Life 2 was absolutely next-gen at the time. Little attention to detail by Valve was loved not just by me but millions of HL2 fans. Can't wait to see what we're going to get. 4K textures for world material. All other textures are 2K. That's going to be GOOD.

Animations reworked: the team is even reworking some of the animations in the game. Now I'm a little more psyched for Half-Life 2 RTX.

3

3

• Valve gave its blessing for Half-Life 2 RTX and is being kept in the loop, even though it has no role in its development;
• NVIDIA is helping with engineering support (they have added Parallax Occlusion Mapping to RTX Remix after Orbifold asked them) and art creation support by mentoring Orbifold on the PBR/path traced workflow;
• Assets remade by Valve for Half-Life: Alyx will be reused whenever possible;
• Textures are being remade by hand;
• The resolution of world materials textures will be upped to 4K, while other textures will be 2K;
• Some animations will be redone as well;
• Most vanilla mods should work with Half-Life 2 RTX;
• The team would love to remake the two Episodes, though those would be separate projects to be handled after this one is completed;
• Orbifold is experimenting with implementing a player character model for reflections and shadows (Gordon doesn't really have one in the vanilla game), but they still haven't figured out a great way to do it;
• As much new content as possible will be backported to the original engine so that it is compatible with the Half-Life 2 VR mod.