Half-Life 2 RTX is getting a playable demo

Half-Life 2 will soon have a playable demo on Steam

Nvidia and Orbifold Studios have confirmed that a demo version of Half-Life 2 RTX will be coming to Steam on March 18th. This demo will include areas from the Ravenholm and Nov Proskpekt areas of the game, and the demo will be free to all owners of Half-Life 2.

Half-Life 2 RTX was built by modders using Nvidia’s RTX Remix toolset. Through RTX Remix, the game supports all of Nvidia’s latest technologies. This includes DLSS Super Resolution, DLSS Multi Frame Generation, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, RTX Volumetrics, RTX Skin, and Neural Radiance Caching.

Below, you can see Half Life 2 RTX in action. Note that this game is only expected to run well on high-end Nvidia RTX graphics cards. This is due to this game’s reliance on Nvidia RTX technologies and its heavy use of ray tracing.

Below, we can see how this game runs on Nvidia’s RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards. At 4K, Half-Life 2 RTX’s demo demands the best GPUs available. Even then, it relies on DLSS (Performance mode), and DLSS Multi-Frame Generation to run at high framerates.

The PC demo for Half-Life RTX will be available on Steam on March 18th. The full RTX remake/remaster has no firm release date.

You can join the discussion on Half-Life 2 RTX’s upcoming Demo on the OC3D Forums.