After years of development, the folks at Orbifold Studios have just dropped the first demo for Half-Life 2 RTX — a remake of Valve's critically acclaimed 2004 first-person shooter.
Half-Life 2 RTX was first announced by Nvidia at Gamescom 2023 as a showcase of the company's RTX Remix creator toolkit — which essentially allows modders to better remaster classic games by implementing new lighting effects and ray tracing, boosting frame rates, and enhancing models and textures.
It is being created by a team of enthusiasts from across the Half-Life fan community, with some of its members having previously worked on projects like Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Raising the Bar: Redux.
The demo is available for free on Steam but requires players to have an existing copy of Half-Life 2. It covers just two locations from the main game (Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt) and takes roughly two hours to complete, with players having to beat Ravenholm before they can tackle the Nova Prospekt chapter.
As you might expect, both of these levels benefit from several enhancements, with the creators stating that the game leverages "new RTX Neural Rendering technologies, cutting-edge full ray tracing, accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex to bring one of the greatest video games of all time to life in a whole new light."
If you want to give it a try, you'll need a graphics card capable of handling these improvements, with Orbifold Studios naming the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 TI on its list of minimum requirements.
A release date for the rest of the game has yet to be revealed. The demo can be downloaded here.