Some of you may remember almost twenty years ago when Half-Life 2 officially launched, it was one of the biggest games ever and became an instant cult classic.
Almost twenty years later, and with no Half-Life 3 in sight, modders have teamed up with Nvidia to bring us the remaster we’ve all been waiting for.
Utilising Nvidia Remix RTX, a free-to-use modding platform that will allow modders to create RTXOn mods for classic games, each with enhanced materials, full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA RTX IO and NVIDIA Reflex, the group of four Half-Life 2 modding teams have combined to form Orbifold Studios.
Orbifold Studios is using the latest version of Nvidia Remix to rebuild in-game materials, adding Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties, which in turn add more geometric detail. The studio will also be able to add things like Ray Tracing, DLSS3, Reflex and RTX IO to the Half-Life 2 Remaster. DLSS3 does mean, however, that only later generation graphics cards, from the third series and up, will be able to maximise the full potential of this modded game.
You can check out the compression video below of some of what the team have been able to accomplish so far. While we can hope that the RTX Remix version of Half-Life 2 will come out for the game’s 20th anniversary next year in November, Nvidia has said that the project has “only just begun” and having to add eight times more detail to a game of this stature is definitely going to take some time.
What do you think of the RTX remaster, is it worthwhile bringing older games like Half-Life back to the modern day of graphics and gaming? Let us know in the comments.