Half-Life 2 RTX

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477290/HalfLife_2_RTX/

by NewHatMatt • 1 year ago

138 81 1 year ago

store.steampowered.com

I know it's a bit silly to criticize something offered for free -- I'm glad it's there for those who want it! -- but I really feel like something of the original aesthetic has been lost in translation here. The before-and-afters aren't always flattering to the new version; everything is glowing orange. Darker atmospheres have become brighter.

bl4ckm0r3• 1 year ago

I thought exactly the same things about the illumination, i feel like it's too much "look how cool rtx is" and not enough "this should be scary and dark". In this, and other demos, i also felt like refractions are exaggerated, like floors that seem like mirrors is not really realistic to the end user. Sometimes it reminds me of when hdr pics came out and everyone was overdoing it. (But it should be a settings problem more than anything else!)

jorvi• 1 year ago

Sometimes it reminds me of when hdr pics came out and everyone was overdoing it.

Or old games that oversold insane amounts of bloom[0] as HDR..

[0]https://i.imgur.com/NdgHLCy.jpg

ListeningPie• 1 year ago

The original aesthetic, including lighting, was made keeping the original limitations in minds. Kind of running old sprite games on LCDs instead of CRTs makes them look jagged.

So it's different and a tech demo, but I agree it's not necessarily better and could be one the reasons it is free.

zeroCalories• 1 year ago

Yeah when looking at games like Alyx it seems like the vision isn't too far off. Personally I don't mind the RTX version as I always found hl2 to be depressingly boring to look at.

moolcool• 1 year ago

It reminds me of the Alan Parsons quote "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment"

macrocosmos• 1 year ago

Love it.

Sorry if this doesn't add anything, I normally just vote when I feel that about a comment.

smallmancontrov2• 1 year ago

Yeah, well, HN top-posters mirror popular opinions to obtain upvotes rather than using upvotes to make correct opinions popular :P

(I'd like to draw attention to posts down-thread from people who have actually played the damn thing, who seem to agree that the overblown lights are more prominent in the marketing material than in the actual game.)

smallmancontrov2• 1 year ago

Can someone who has played it tell me if they really lit up most/all of Ravenholm like this or if they are just showing us a few lights cranked to 12 in the promotional material?

roboror3• 1 year ago

The concern is overblown. The lighting doesn't seem out of place when you're playing, just in A/B testing. It's way better and more accurate overall.

accrual3• 1 year ago

I just played it a bit - IMO it's plenty dark.

I used Alt + X to get into settings and decrease the brightness from 50 to 40, but even without that it felt dark, dark enough that I couldn't see anything down an unilluminated hallway.

It looks and feels great though, I'm excited for the full release.

robin_reala2• 1 year ago

Digital Foundry have a side-by-side playthrough and discussion of Ravenholm comparing HL2 RTX and the launch-day HL2 from DVD on a period-correct machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHRS0TO89UI

whalesalad2• 1 year ago

On the contrary I find OG HL2 to be one of the ugliest games of all time. It's so dark and gray and flat.

crest2• 1 year ago

Some of the new scenes are just too damn bright, but the few that preserved the atmosphere looked really good in the trailer.

zokier• 1 year ago

I don't understand why they made everything have that weird sickly yellow cast. It's so weird.

jonwinstanley3• 1 year ago

Isnt it all a bit bright too?

ericol• 1 year ago

Most video games allow for configuring brightness right at the start.

My impression is that they were more interested in showing the improvements than being faithful to the original atmosphere.

taco_emoji• 1 year ago

Could be a factor of settings--I wonder if they just bumped the brightness to emphasize the differences, especially for a tiny video.

roboror3• 1 year ago

I think A/B viewing is throwing you off. It looks great when you actually play it.

staticman2• 1 year ago

With ray tracing Nvidia made a new technology that breaks everyone's PC performance then they sold the solution to that broken performance as a card upgrade with better ray tracing hardware. Even though the Ray tracing doesn't necessarily look any better, just different, we now have to upgrade cards to solve the broken PC performance Nvidia caused themselves...

beastman82• 1 year ago

It looks awesome.

diggan• 1 year ago

I think what parent is complaining about is the "Art Direction" rather than the technology itself, and I think I agree. Some of the feeling and mood been lost in the translation, sadly. I'm sure if they had some better art direction (maybe they didn't have a person from Valve to help with this?), it could have been a lot better in that regard, even with ray tracing and the rest.

overgard• 1 year ago

I actually like it; but I think the point is more to demonstrate cool tech than to be true to Half Life's mood. It kind of reminds me of when in the 90s games started supporting colored lightings, and briefly everything was uh, very colorful. Although I think this is a lot more tasteful than that!

whalesalad2• 1 year ago

Still nothing on ProtonDB about this - https://www.protondb.com/app/2477290

Anyone got it working? I have an RX6600 in my Linux workstation but I have been thinking about upgrading to play some games here and there.

GranPC• 1 year ago

According to the reporting on GamingOnLinux, it works. Haven't tried it myself yet.

roboror3• 1 year ago

You're not going to have a good time with a RX6600

Retr0id• 1 year ago

My main complaint with the original half life 2 was that the floors weren't shiny enough, so I'm glad to see this has finally been rectified.

royletron• 1 year ago

But this is sooooo shiny!

rob74• 1 year ago

Hm, have I watched the same video? Most of the difference I saw on the floors is lighting and shadows, the only case where the floor was really "shiny" was a tiled floor, and that is actually reflective in real life, so...

hyperbrainer2• 1 year ago

But Ravenholm loses some of its scare-factor due to that.

jonwinstanley3• 1 year ago

hahaha

feverzsj2• 1 year ago

I actually prefer old games. They are just crystal sharp with MSAA. Much easier on my eyes than modern game.

rowanG077• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say I prefer it. There are a ton of top tier modern games. But you are right that there is this persistent blurriness. I have no clue what it is but it just looks super ugly and the result is for me that even some 10 year old game in effect do look better...

Vt71fcAqt7• 1 year ago

It's temporal anti-aliasing.

Temporal anti-aliasing is another form of super-sampling, but instead of downscaling from a much larger image, data from prior frames is reprojected into the current one.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-temporal-anti-...

HelloUsername2• 1 year ago

The trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31ISEd8xRM) actually shows the old lighting has much more mood and atmosphere.. RTX is far too bright. Ravenholm is supposed to be scary!

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

I thought its mood was more fun grav-killbox. Relative to contemporary games and sections re scare factor.

jonwinstanley3• 1 year ago

Yes, way too bright. The ray tracing is great but couldn't they have reduced the source brightness?

flanbiscuit• 1 year ago

Most games allow you to adjust brightness. I assume the brightness can be turned down to get closer to the original lighting and mood... I hope.

superxpro122• 1 year ago

This is mostly a consequence of designing the ambiance using the tools of the time. You really need someone to go in and relight every environment with RTX in mind now, to properly take advantage of the capabilities.

I had a similar experience when I bought an OLED gaming monitor. It has perfect black, but when you go to play any game, they've all been lit assuming LCD screens, so blacks are really grey and the superior OLED contrast is basically useless.

Simply inserting the new tech isnt enough. The games need a redesign incorporating these new technological capabilities.

kube-system• 1 year ago

Lighting demo gonna lighting.

HelloUsername2• 1 year ago

Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Developers Respond to Concern From Some Fans That It Ruins the Original Game's Atmosphere

https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-2-rtx-remix-developer...

AdmiralAsshat• 1 year ago

Does this require an NVIDIA GPU to run? Or is a comparable AMD GPU sufficient?

dcan• 1 year ago

I tried Portal RTX on a 9070 XT and got 20 FPS at full resolution (no frame generation). There’s no driver limitations, but I have no idea what the expected FPS is

thot_experiment• 1 year ago

yikes that's dismal, I wonder what a 5070 gets

hyperbrainer2• 1 year ago

You need RT-capable cards and minimum 3060Ti or equivalent.

pawelduda• 1 year ago

According to one of the Steam reviews, it ran horrible on RTX 4070 due to insufficient VRAM. The trailer shows FPS counter with 4x framegen, which is exclusive to 50xx series, also most likely relies on Nvidia upscaling. I wouldn't be too optimistic for AMD GPUs here

accrual3• 1 year ago

Doesn't directly answer your question as I don't have a modern AMD card to test with, but even with an RTX 5080 Super + 9800X3D, I was still only getting about ~45-55 FPS at 4K60. I left the default settings of High and DLSS enabled (Ultra was slower). Turning off DLSS tanked the FPS to like ~15-20 and ate up almost the full 16GB of VRAM.

Even so, it was still really cool to experience and was plenty playable as-is. I'm excited to see the full release.

CivBase2• 1 year ago

I tested with an RX 7900 XTX on Fedora/Proton for ~5 minutes at the start of Ravenholm. My FPS counter was consistently over 50 once all the assets were loaded, but the image was extremely blurry. I don't know the cause and I couldn't find an obvious way to fix it. The framerate was fine, but the blur made it unplayable. I don't know if that issue translates to other AMD GPUs.

klaussilveira• 1 year ago

It's funny how, in my opinion, whenever the RTX On/Off comparison shows up, the older has better mood, atmosphere and design. The "RTX On" almost feels like "Generic UE5 pseudo-realism On".

Based on other comments, I'm not the only one. Is "RTX On" the "bloom/motionblur/green filter" of this generation?

josteink• 1 year ago

While I think the ray-traced version looks better in a technical sense, it seems to me that they have completely forgotten to apply darkness and shadow appropriately in the scenes to create an immersive atmosphere.

Keep all the new tech and dial the ambient lighting down. That would look way better.

Make it feel dark, uncertain and risky again. You’re not supposed to know what’s in that corner or that room before it comes lounging at you.

In the RTX version you can see everything in every location, completely killing any sense of suspense.

torginus2• 1 year ago

I've always wondered that by gaining the ability to simulate light (or basically anything) in a more accurate manner, we reduce artists' ability to control the final result.

Back in 2D times, an artist could just set a pixel to a given color, and it would be that color, in early 3d, they had the ability to paint in shadows/highlights or control the texture colors directly.

With the physically based workflow, they had to author roughness/metalness and albedo maps, and were hoping for the best that the final result looked good in the game.

Nowadays with simulated light bounces, changing anyting in the scene could affect everything else, making controlling the final result that much harder.

Yes it does look better automatically, but at the cost of adding difficult of channeling the artists' vision.

Joker_vD• 1 year ago

Personally, the two most alluring things about RTX for me is a) better global illumination, none of that silly "you can see sunrise shining through the mountain/cave's ceiling" stuff; b) better local illumination: a glowing object should be an actual light source and make its surroundings brighter, dammit.

Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

I'm not a fan of graphics mods, but there is a similar problem with fan made RPG mods that "bring a game up to date with the technology" (wide screen, qol etc). A lot of mod packs feel like they have to add content (characters, quests) that is not so likely to fit in with the original game just because they can.

At least in Gibberlings mod packs for the infinity engine games the extra content is non existing or optional...

archagon• 1 year ago

It matters that the original lighting was carefully hand-crafted by (presumably) environment artists and level designers working with strict limitations. What couldn’t be rendered was faked.

But yeah, I tend to find RTX a massive waste of framerate for little practical gain.

bsimpson• 1 year ago

I had Macs growing up and missed out on all the Half Lives until I finally got to play Alyx last year. I tried HL1 after that, but couldn't really get into it.

That said, Valve released the Anniversary Update for Half Life 2 a few months back which includes a bunch of quality of life improvements for modern setups.

There's also a VR mod for Half Life 2, which is supposed to make it one of the best games available in VR.

Clamchop• 1 year ago

Half-Life 1 was groundbreaking but still very much of its era. Half-Life 2 feels like a modern game, though.

flakes• 1 year ago

HL1 is a very different experience compared to HL2. If you haven't played through HL2 I would still give that a shot. I love both games, but the second one was a lot more polished.

haunter• 1 year ago

I tried HL1 after that, but couldn't really get into it.

Try Black Mesa. It's a modern remake but very true to the original.

gitaarik• 1 year ago

Try Black Mesa instead of HL1, it's HL1 rebuild in source engine by fans.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

This seems like so much work, what motivates people to just give it all away for free? Are the devs independently wealthy or funded by a rich patron?

gmueckl• 1 year ago

I would assume that nVidia financed this as a tech demo for their stuff. They did a similar thing with Quake 2 RTX a few years back.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

Also hobbies. Not every activity has to be for monetary gain. Or full time for that matter.

Maybe not in this case, which may be a paid for nvidia ad. But in the case of a lot of mod/remakes, yes, they're done for free.

jfindley• 1 year ago

There's a lot of rumours flying around that HL3 might be coming soonish, and when it arrives it'll almost certainly support RTX. It's also possible that it'll be built on an evolution of the HL2 engine. If so, it might have been seen as a useful development and marketing exercise to backport the RTX changes to the older HL2 engine version.

xattt• 1 year ago

Funny to see this, given that HL2 was sold bundled with ATI cards in the early 2000s.

pferde• 1 year ago

Anything to avoid changing that "2" at the end to "3", huh?

stanac• 1 year ago

It's a mod, not made by Valve. Also there are rumors that new HL game is coming this year (or in next 25 years).

https://x.com/mikeshapiroland/status/1874213952680607922

That's G-Man voice actor.

stuckinhell• 1 year ago

This is all pretty amazing tech. Can we easily remaster old games with AI tech now ?

accrual3• 1 year ago

Definitely possible, but probably not easily. The "easiest" remastering I've seen simply upscales textures to 2K or 4K which provides an inexpensive way to resharpen old games without losing too much of their original look.

For this HL2 RTX mod though, my understanding is they had to add all new lighting sources to hopefully match the original intent, and looks like they remodeled many items and actors too.

jnsie• 1 year ago

By the time I got around to playing Half Life the graphics were so dated that I found it difficult to enjoy (that's obviously a personal preference thing...). I was excited, for a moment, at the possibility of finally enjoying what I'm told is one of the greatest games ever made...until I realized that I do not (and will not any time soon) own a 50xx series graphics card. I suppose a GeForce Now subscription is a possibility.

superxpro122• 1 year ago

Does anyone have any details on how this was implemented? I thought that Source was a closed source engine. They rewrote the rendering pipeline using only the sdk?

Maybe they relied on the source engine leaks from a decade ago?

For some reason, I am very curious how this was pulled off.

feverzsj2• 1 year ago

the RTX Remix application lets modders drag and drop lights, move objects, copy-paste existing objects into a scene to increase clutter and grass coverage, convert lights to be fully ray-traced, AI enhance textures, and add DLSS to improve image quality and accelerate performance.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-half-lif...

CivBase2• 1 year ago

For those wondering about AMD performance, I did some very brief testing. I have an Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card and a Ryzen 7800X3D running Fedora 41 with Proton Experimental on a 1920x1200 display.

I booted into the Ravenholm level and immediately got mid-50 FPS with no obvious stuttering. The framerate jumped over 70 once I got inside the first couple buildings. Those framerates are not ideal given the cost of my hardware, but I'd consider them to be perfectly playable. Or at least I would if not for the bigger problem...

The image quality was extremely blurry such that I could not clearly see anything over 10ft/3m away. There were no obvious graphics options I could change to fix this. I don't know if this is a result of some upscaling tech not working with my AMD card, a weird Proton issue, an anti-aliasing or depth-of-field feature gone horribly wrong, or something else entirely. Regardless, I'd consider it to be unplayable until the blur issue is resolved.

clearleaf• 1 year ago

The way nvidia plasters their name all over this project isn't right. I was led to believe an nvidia team was being paid to make this. But they have practically no relation outside of the underlying tech. They're so unclear about the role of rtx remix that I wouldn't be surprised i some people think RTX automatically "upscales" models somehow. Something about it is a step beyond how an engine dev would treat a game made in their engine.

Half-Life 2 RTX

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