NVIDIA Unveils Playable Half-Life 2 RTX With Glorious Ray Tracing

Half-Life, one of the best first person shooters of all time, got its flowers with the amazing Black Mesa remake made by fans with Valve’s blessing. Half-Life 2 is now getting the same treatment, once again led by fans, with Half-Life 2 RTX. While the team initially debuted its effort towards the end of last year, it still needed more time in the oven. However, NVIDIA decided the time was right to give gamers a sneak peek at what a modernized version of the game will look and feel like.

A demo of Half-Life 2 RTX will be available on Steam for those who already own the original game. This demo will benefit from all the latest bells and whistles available on NVIDIA GPUs, such as DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and RTX Neural Shaders. Of course, to enjoy all this eye candy, players will need to have hardware that supports these features. This means having one of the company’s latest RTX 50 series GPUs, many of which we’ve put through their paces.


This remake is possible thanks to NVIDIA’s RTX Remix tool, which allow modders to bring graphical upgrades to older titles. It allows for a variety of changes to aspects within the game world such as moving lights and objects, convert lighting over to being completely ray traced, AI enhanced textures, and implementing DLSS for improved performance. However, Half-Life 2 RTX goes a step further by rebuilding in game assets and taking advantage of PBR-based workflows for an impressive remake a game like Half-Life 2 deserves.

Best of all, the demo will be available soon, with players being able to experience Half-Life 2 RTX on March 18. It will be available for download on the game’s official Steam page.