Half-Life 2 RTX now has a playable demo on Steam

PC gamers can now play Half-Life 2 RTX’s free Demo version

Orbifold Studios have just released their playable demo of Half-Life 2 RTX, their full remaster of Half-Life 2. This community-made mod uses Nvidia’s RTX Remix toolset, which allows gamers to upgrade games with fully ray-traced lighting, new assets, new textures, and more. In other words, RTX Remix is allowing gamers to bring cutting-edge visuals to PC classics.

The PC demo for Half-Life RTX is 50GB in size and includes areas from the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt areas of the game. The demo should have around 2 hours of playable content and will give gamers a glimpse at what Half-Life 2 RTX will look like when the full game is remastered.

Half-Life RTX has sky-high PC system requirements.

Like all games with “full ray tracing”, Half-Life 2 RTX’s demo has high system requirements. For 1080p 30 FPS gameplay, Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti is recommended. For a game with this much ray tracing, DLSS is pretty much mandatory. If you want 1080p 60 FPS gameplay at “high” settings, Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is recommended.

For high framerates gameplay at 4K Ultra settings, Nvidia recommends its RTX 5080 graphics card. This demo uses Nvidia’s DLSS Multi-Frame Generation and Neural Rendering technologies to achieve this level of performance. Note that Half-Life 2 RTX’s PC demo makes use of all of Nvidia’s RTX features to achieve high levels of PC performance.

If you want to see all of Nvidia’s RTX features in action, this demo is a must-download. However, be prepared for the game to run poorly on older RTX GPUs. This is especially true if you own a high-resolution display. If you use a non-Nvidia graphics card, good luck getting this to run at playable framerates. This demo pretty much requires DLSS to run well.

Half-Life 2 RTX’s PC demo is now available to download on Steam.

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