It’s been 20 years since the release of Half-Life 2, and Nvidia is celebrating with not only a sweepstakes, but an RTX version of the game.
Nvidia is running a competition on Twitter to win an exclusive GeForce RTX 4080 Super graphics card with a Half-Life 2 design and, of course, Gordon Freeman. To enter, you can like the tweet and reply with #HalfLife2RTX. There’s only one card, so there will be a lot more people interested in this hardware.
The graphics card, which was available for $1000 in the US at launch, features 16GB of GDDR6X VRAM and 10240 CUDA cores, and can hold its own at 1440p or even 4K. Support for DLSS 3 and frame generation can improve performance even more if you’re playing with maximized graphics at 4K resolution.
We’ve also got new video of Half-Life 2 RTX being worked on by Orbifold Studios. It’s a remaster project using Nvidia’s RTX Remix technology, and even Valve has given it their blessing (so Gabe Newell won’t take it down). Unfortunately, the video doesn’t give any information about when we’ll be able to play Half-Life 2 with ray tracing, as the developers also said that they have a lot of assets to remaster, and although over 100 people have already contributed, they’re still looking for people…
“Half-Life 2 is my favorite game. I’ve been playing it for over 20 years. The whole game is full of memorable experiences: getting off the train for the first time and walking up to the platform and seeing Dr. Breen on the giant screen above you. The gameplay and storytelling still hold up incredibly well, but we wanted to recapture that sense of awe that we all had 20 years ago when we first played it.
RTX Remix is at the heart of our remastering process. The original engine has very severe limitations. In Half-Life 2 RTX we have full ray traced reflections and refractions on water and glass and volumetric fog with cool lighting and shadows. We actually have full 3D detail in there, and it’s all self-shadowing and reflective, and it looks pretty stunning,” says Wormslayer, the project lead.
But when can we expect it?
Source: WCCFTech
