Half-Life 2 RTX, An RTX Remix Project - Announce Trailer
Half-Life 2 RTX, An RTX Remix Project - Announce Trailer
RTX On/Off feels really dishonest here given the assets swap as well.
You have to use new assets for these old games if you really want to make the most out of ray tracing because PBR materials are necessary to better simulate the way light and reflections bounce off a surface.
I disagree that you really need to put much effort into updating the materials to get benefits from rtx. HL1 RTX looks pretty great with only the bare minimum PBR remasters, because PBR and RTX are 2 separate things that both improve a game's look. PBR materials help rtx just as much as PBR materials help regular rendering, and rtx helps PBR materials only a little bit more than rtx helps regular materials. All of the effects used in PBR materials apply the same to regular rendering as with RTX.
They're likely using rtx remix to replace assets. Rtx isn't just ray tracing.
So we'll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?
That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.
I find it hilarious that the "RTX On" is remastered assets and the "RXT Off" is just the original game.
Id be more interested in seeing what the original assets with RTX look like.
Or new assets with RTX on and off. As it is it looks like RTX is responsible for the new textures, which is far from honest.
Very wrong, without proper materials, light bounces would make no sense (if there would be even any)
Wrong, if you just ported the original HL2 materials, things might look slightly weird but light bounces will very much be present and it would still look better than the original renderer. Light bounces (for global illumination) will happen with any material parameters. HL2 materials had bump and a kind of merged reflectiveness and metalicness value already, and if you ported them over correctly things would look acceptable (but not ideal).
There was a setting for that in portal rtx, I'm sure it will be in hl2 rtx as well.
I might be in the minority here, but I couldn't help but think Half-Life 2 still looks really good for a game released in 2004. Obviously "RTX on" is nicer to look at, but all the small details like the magnifying glass that actually magnifies made me appreciate the old assets/graphics so much, what a milestone it was.
To be honest, the biggest takeaway of the trailer is how well the original HL2 aged.
Another free remaster to try to sell the NVIDIA 40xx generation, can't complain. Even as someone not buying into this gen it will still be there for future ones.
Portal RTX runs pretty well on last gen cards with a little tweaking, I’m guessing we can expect the same for HL2.
Remember the Quake 2 RTX version? Remember how no one played it? It's just, not a good look, runs slow and just isn't needed. This is all just to make more people buy Nvidia cards.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Quake 2 RTX is my go-to recommendation if someone wants to see what raytracing is actually about. Not only are there some built in tools to fiddle with lighting but the end result makes such a huge difference that I can't see myself playing Quake 2 again without raytracing. Out of all the RTX supported games Quake 2 was the one that blew me away the most. It makes bright areas bright and dark areas actually dark and you can see how light sources, in real time, change the look of the environment.
I'll be the one to be overly excited: GIVE IT TO ME!
Wish they'd do Hal-Life 1 with ray tracing because my video card might actually be able to run that one.
Quake 2 RTX can bring my 3090 to its knees. You could do HL2 but I bet it’d be about similar to Portal RTX
There is Black Mesa if you're looking for a Half Life 1 remake. Not sure if there is raytracing in it though.
Good news then: https://github.com/sultim-t/xash-rt/releases
The cool thing about raytracing is it doesn't really matter how complex a scene is. The bad thing about raytracing is it doesn't really matter how complex a scene is.
If your card can't run remixed HL2, it also won't be able to do HL1
I know it’s not the latest and greatest but I’m so happy I’ve got a 3090 to play this on. Can not wait.
You son of a bitch, I'm in!
Awesome, really looking forward to this!
Well, cool project but let me see something outside of that room!
Yeah, that was not really a good room to show off RT features. Most of the shown effects can be convincingly faked with modern shader techniques.
What ever happened to Project Borealis?
I hope they do the episodes as well.
Download link, please? I can't find one anywhere.
(Also, how in the hell do you install these things? I tried to play the RTX remix of NFS Underground 2, but gave up cause I couldn't figure it out. There's no installer, and it's not as simple as just copying files over...)
It's not out yet, this is just an announcement