A playable demo for the RTX version of Valve’s first-person shooter, Half-Life 2, is now available, making it possible to do a comparison with the 2004 original.
The Half-Life 2 RTX demo features levels from the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt sections. For those interested in giving it a try, the demo will require a ray tracing supported GPU at minimum in order to run. A side-by-side comparison between Half-Life 2 RTX and the original version reveal a huge graphical leap.
The RTX version of Half-Life 2 features vastly improved and physically accurate global illumination, with realistic light bounce and dispersion. Similarly, shadows are now cast in a more physically correct manner. Ray traced reflections are visible across reflective surfaces in the RTX version of the game. Beyond the ray tracing improvements, textures, level of detail, and geometry have seen a massive leap over the assets seen in the 2004 original.
On the flip side, the RTX version of Half-Life 2 can sometimes look too bright in nighttime areas, which tends to break the artistic intent of the original. Tweaking the emission strength of certain light sources may yield results that retain the atmospheric look of the original in such darker areas.
On the whole, though, Half-Life 2 RTX offers a spectacular graphical leap over the vanilla version, especially during daytime sections. Fans of the original who have been looking for a reason to jump back into City 17 now have a pretty good one in the RTX version.
In related news, on the occasion of the Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary, Valve released a documentary that brought members of the game’s development team back to talk about its production. Writer Marc Laidlaw mentioned that he still doesn’t know what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would have been if it had been built because it hadn’t been completed. It was set in the Arctic and centered around the Borealis.
