Valve’s Half-Life 2 remains a landmark in PC gaming more than two decades after its release, but a recent mod has significantly upgraded its aging visuals, allowing players to push their high-end graphics cards to the limit.
In a video sponsored by Nvidia, PCWorld’s Adam explores the new ray tracing and graphical enhancements while also speaking with the developers behind the project.
Half-Life 2 RTX is a free upgrade for those who already own the original game (and after countless Steam sales, that’s likely most PC gamers). However, to fully experience the visual overhaul, you’ll need an RTX 50-series card.
The update introduces ray tracing and path tracing for dramatically improved lighting effects, along with newly enhanced in-game assets featuring higher polygon counts and upgraded textures—giving those realistic lighting effects something worthy to reflect off of.
Half-Life 2 Support With RTXNaturally, these enhancements come at a performance cost, making even a modern gaming PC work harder than it would with the unmodified 20-year-old version.
To maintain smooth gameplay, the updated version supports the latest DLSS technology, Multi Frame Generation, neural radiance caching, and several other advanced rendering techniques.
Adam also spoke with David Driver-Gomm, the project lead for HL2RTX and a key developer at Orbifold Studios. The studio itself is an interesting collaboration, formed by several modder teams that were already working on Half-Life projects.
While not officially affiliated with Valve, this is still a broadly approved project with its own Steam listing. At the moment, only the Ravenholm section of Half-Life 2 has been fully enhanced in the demo, but the team’s ultimate goal is to remaster the entire game.
