Half-Life 2 RTX now has a demo available on Steam for those of you who want to check out what Orbifold Studios have done to the Valve classic with ray tracing. You do need to own Half-Life 2 to be able to play the mod.
From the Steam page:
Ravenholm and Nova Proskpekt demo coming March 18th.
The fight for freedom begins anew. Experience the award-winning game that has captivated millions of players worldwide with its immersive story, thrilling combat, and mind-bending physics, fully overhauled with full ray tracing, new hand-crafted, physically based textures, enhanced high-poly models, and updated lighting, all in stunning 4K.
Half-Life 2 RTX is a free DLC for all Half-Life 2 owners developed by Orbifold Studios, a collective of passionate, community-assembled developers behind Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Raising the Bar: Redux.
Half-Life 2 RTX uses the latest version of RTX Remix leveraging new RTX Neural Rendering technologies, cutting-edge full ray tracing, accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex to bring one of the greatest video games of all time to life in a whole new light.
Direct Link
Just out of curiosity, I did give it a try on my Kubuntu Linux system. Although this is with an AMD Radeon 6800 XT, so I was expecting it to barely run at all. It does actually run though with the latest Proton 9.0-4 but as you can probably imagine, it performs awfully out of the box on my system.
If you press ALT+X, you can open the Remix menu to change settings.
Fiddling with a few settings then caused it to crash and quit.
I'm curious to see what your thoughts are now it's available for testing. Do you think it's too bright? Or do you love the enhancements? Let me know.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
"
Community-Made Mod
This community-made mod requires that you own Half-Life 2.
Click here to learn more about mods on Steam.
"
Where does it say you don't need to own Half-Life 2?
Last edited by d10sfan on 18 Mar 2025 at 2:00 pm UTC
AsciiWolf 11 hours ago
Liam Dawe 11 hours ago
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 18 Mar 2025 at 2:34 pm UTC
hardpenguin 9 hours ago
Ehvis 9 hours ago
CatKiller 8 hours ago
I'm curious to see what your thoughts are now it's available for testing. Do you think it's too bright? Or do you love the enhancements?
When I watched the DF video about it the biggest issue was that the fire was way too bright. The environment otherwise seemed like a reasonable match to the feel of the original. I'll try the demo later but, with Ravenholm being the reason I've never completed HL2, I don't expect to enjoy it that much.
Edit: so I couldn't get it to not crash one second into the intro video without specifying the -vulkan parameter, which is weird because I believe it's using DXVK even on Windows, and the game rendering itself is broken with bright white surfaces where textures with reflections should be. And the keyboard shortcut to bring up the RTX settings box doesn't do anything, so I can't fix whatever auto-detected settings have made it look like that. And I don't like the game enough to bother to troubleshoot further.
Last edited by CatKiller on 18 Mar 2025 at 7:01 pm UTC
doragasu 7 hours ago
Slackdog 6 hours ago
Ehvis 1 hour ago
I'd at least expect DLSS quality to look somewhat good despite the low fps, but it really doesn't. Everything is grainy. Lots of smearing and edge artefacts. Basic things you'd expect with upscaling, but much worse.
As for the assets, it's kind of weird. I got this weird uncanny valley experience from it. Sure a lot (not all of it) is more detailed, but it never seems to fit in context of the level. I guess my brain is expecting the assets to match the level design and it doesn't. I guess I should have expected this since I have the same issue with mods that do similar things.
As Liam mentioned. Everything feels overly bright and washed out. To a level that I'm wondering if this thing my require HDR to be viewed properly.
Unplayable as expected, but I expected a better visuals like Portal RTX. Maybe that game was just better suited for the ray tracing treatment.
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