Gordon Freeman’s hour has come again as Nvidia and Orbifold Studios offer up the first playable slices of Half-Life 2 RTX, a path-traced remaster of Valve’s classic first-person shooter. I’ve spent the past several days fighting my way through Ravenholm, original and remastered, to properly digest the developers’ efforts to bring the eerie town into the modern era. In doing so I’ve come away hungry for more, but not without some small reservations.
Before diving into my impressions of Half-Life 2 RTX, allow me to describe the test setup I’m working with as this is a demo that can punish even the most high-end of hardware. I’ve commandeered one of the Club386 AM5 test benches but swapped out its CPU and GPU for parts with more horsepower, namely a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition and AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Suffice to say, this is as good a system as you could want to play any game. Without further ado, let’s go to Ravenholm.
Stepping into the chapter’s opening courtyard sent shivers down my spine, as if I were a starry-eyed 10 years old again and experiencing this iconic Half-Life 2 for the first time all over again. This moment and many others throughout the demo demonstrate Orbifold Studio’s generally deft handling in marrying the spirit of Valve’s original vision with modern rendering techniques and stylings.
As one would expect from a remaster, every asset has been given a fresh coat of paint (including the paint cans). You won’t find a texture from the original game here, save for blood splatters and water splashes that Orbifold will replace come launch. Placing assets old and new side-by-side showcases an enormous gap in fidelity between Half-Life 2 and its RTX remaster.
Diving into the nitty-gritty of it all, Orbifold has far more polygons to play with than Valve ever did back in 2004, providing a higher level of geometric detail on all in-game objects. These remastered assets also benefit from Physically Based Rendering (PBR), allowing for qualities such as bumps, scratches, and reflectivity that all interact with the game’s lighting. Take the chrome top of the gas canisters above, which now shine as they should in place of a static stand-in for metallic materials. These upgrades are found throughout the demo, such as on the power generators and their surrounding structure behind Father Grigori’s pyre.
Impressive as these new assets are, the main draw of Half-Life 2 RTX is inarguably its path tracing. Replacing the baked lighting of the original game with a single ray tracing algorithm, Orbifold uses the technology to handle global illumination, reflections, shadows, and more. Naturally, this has a dramatic effect on how the game looks and runs.
Take Grigori’s pyre, for instance. Through path tracing, Half-Life 2 RTX portrays the brightness, heat, and smoke of the fiery monument far more realistically and brilliantly. Looking back at the original meeting with the priest, the scene is far less dramatic owing to the primitive volumetrics and lighting.
The way light, particularly fire, interacts with the environment doesn’t just make for pretty static scenes either. Setting headcrab zombies alight in dark hallways turns them into disturbing dynamic lights, filling rooms with smoke and fire in an awesomely horrifying manner. Watching a horde of these horrorshows shuffle up the stairs, screaming as their flesh burns and the room fills with orange light is breathtaking as it is blood-chilling.
However, there is the occasional instance where accuracy comes at the cost of art. To borrow and amend a phrase from G-Man: “the right light in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” A noticeable example of this is in the room just to the right of Grigori’s pyre.
In the original game, the room is foreboding and filled with shadow, partially obfuscating the headcrab zombie trapped in a cage. Meanwhile, in Half-Life 2 RTX, it’s far brighter and there’s no enemy waiting in the darkness for you to discover. For the most part I think Orbifold have done an excellent job of balancing art and accuracy. Nonetheless, there clearly are some scenes that would benefit from less adherence to original light placements.
Much as my descriptions and screenshots can capture some of these moments, you’re better off experiencing them first-hand and you can try the demo for yourself for free via Steam. Keep in mind, though, that path tracing is taxing even on flagship hardware and you should prepare yourself to make full use of DLSS 4 in getting Half-Life 2 RTX running well.
Maxing out Half-Life 2 RTX with its ‘Ultra’ preset in tandem with DLSS Super Resolution in ‘Performance’ mode, upscaling to 4K from 1080p, I was able to maintain an average frame rate north of 60fps. Of course, this is far short of the 600+fps I can enjoy natively in the original game but such is the price of this remaster’s visual splendour. I’m curious to see how well Half-Life 2 RTX runs on older hardware, as the game’s system requirements call for a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at minimum.
My head is racing like a resonance cascade, wondering how difficult it will be to navigate City 17’s dark and damp sewers with RT shadows, or how the battle at dusk between the airboat and Combine chopper will look thanks to RTGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination), among many other chapters and moments burned in my mind. I’m tempering my excitement with a spoonful of scepticism, of course, but for the moment I’m raring to board that train and bring down the Combine all over again.
