Nvidia games games a fresh look at Half-Life 2 RTX

Half-Life 2 RTX has a new trailer, and it looks incredible

A year has passed since Half Life 2 RTX was revealed, and Orbifold Studios has been making steady progress on the highly anticipated mod. Half-Life 2 RTX uses Nvidia’s RTX Remix technology to revamp Valve’s classic FPS with full ray tracing, new assets, PBR materials, and more. Essentially, this is a path-traced remake Half-Life 2, and Gamescom attendees will b able to get some hands-on time with the game at the Nvidia booth.

For those who can’t attend Gamescom, Nvidia have released a new “Nova Prospekt” trailer for the RTX Remix. Here, Nvidia has confirmed that the mod will feature DLSS 3.5, Nvidia Reflex, and RTX IO. This allows the mod to benefit from Nvidia’s entire RTX feature set, something that will make the game look and play best on Nvidia hardware.

Rise & shine for a new look at Nova Prospekt in Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project developed by Orbifold Studios. The modders are rebuilding materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties, adding extra geometric detail and leveraging NVIDIA technologies including full ray tracing, DLSS 3.5, Reflex, and RTX IO to deliver a fantastic experience for GeForce RTX gamers to this classic.

Sadly, this new version of Half-Life still lacks a firm release date. That said, the action sequences in the trailer above confirm that the mod is in an advanced state. However, this is only a look at a small section of the full game. This RTX Remix likely requires a lot more asset and texture replacements before it is finished. After all, Half-Life is a big game, and it has a lot of assets to rework.

When will this Nvidia-backed version of Half-Life be released? Who knows… Like Portal with RTX, we expect it to be released on Steam when it is ready. My bet is that it won’t be released before Nvidia’s RTX 5090. Half-Life is basically a sacred franchise for PC gamers. Why wouldn’t Nvidia exploit than to sell their next-generation RTX GPUs?

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