Half Life 2 RTX, the Nvidia-backed graphical overhaul mod for Valve’s seminal FPS, has a Steam demo out today. It covers both the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt chapters, for an extended look at how much ray-slash-path tracing, RTX Remix asset remastering, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation is being packed into the decades-old shooter.
I’ve had a few plays of the Ravenholm section – my copy of the demo is bugged and won’t unlock Nova Prospekt, which is a problem Gordon Freeman and his bugs never had. It’s alright! If you’ve got a sufficiently muscular graphics card then it’s good for a spot of sightseeing, though I would say there’s also perhaps more of a straight tech demo vibe here than Portal with RTX had. The visual upgrades don’t hurt HL2’s atmosphere, but they don’t improve it either.
There are eye-feasts for sure: I love the chunky 3D-ness of the brick walls and cobbled streets, and Gravity Gunning a fuel barrel at a gang of headcrab shamblers sees the previous metallic pop replaced by a blinding, fiery boom. The zombies themselves have had their models redone, but keep frame-perfect recreations of Valve’s jerky animation work, helping to keep the general feel of Ravenholm’s close-quarters monsterslaying intact.
Tinkering with time-defying favourites like this is a dangerous game – at least one ray tracing mod for the original Half-Life basically refused to play, pairing its more modern effects with ones that intentionally made it look older. Half-Life 2 RTX might not be that creative, but it is an acceptably faithful remaster, which is an achievement in itself given how much has been swapped out and spruced up.
At the same time, all these new models, textures, lights, and shadows never amount to more than simple eye candy. Portal with RTX worked at least in part because the more vivid effects helped, however subtly, to further sell the original idea that you’re trapped in a warren of impossible mad science. The added glow of the portals evoked an even more unknowable and otherworldly quality, while the fierce brightness of those crackling energy orbs made them seem deadlier and more volatile.
Half-Life 2 RTX looks good, but I’m not sure it has the same effect. Outside of one singular shadows-on-the-wall moment, the mod’s new tech does little to heighten the tension of being trapped in a booby-trapped ghost town. The zombies aren’t any more gruesome. The set-pieces aren’t any more dramatic. The dwindling of your non-Gravity Gun resources isn’t any more unnerving. It still plays like an excellent slice of action-horror, because it’s Ravenholm, but the shelf life of the visual upgrades struggles to extend beyond that initial “Oh cool” moment.
Worse, there are times when the remastering over-eggs it. Father Grigori’s timeless introduction, bursting onto his attic perch and dropping headcrabs like Psalms, is heavily obscured by the thick smoke billowing off his flaming victims. Down in front, smoke. While 99% of the texture and model work is executed more sympathetically to the original, there’s also a new bit of roof edge geometry that clips into the drainpipes that fast zombies are so keen on climbing. This would be a nitpick worthy of the most petulant CinemaSins video, except you actually spend quite a bit of time eyeing up these pipes, as they’re central to two separate action crescendos – making the paradoxical lack of polish all the more obvious.
The hardware price of admission could be an issue too, as although you can adjust the quality of the path tracing effects, you can’t turn them off entirely. At 1440p with DLSS on Performance mode, my personal PC’s RTX 3090 – more typically a 4K engine – only averaged 54fps, with tangible drops below. To try actual 4K, I switched to the RPS test rig and an RTX 5080, and again, this needed DLSS on Performance to average 50fps. Frame generation is on hand, pushing the RTX 5080 up to 89fps on the 2x setting and 165fps on 4x, though this adds enough input lag that I wouldn’t want to enable frame gen without first securing at least 60fps’ worth of standard frames. Cheaper GPUs like the RTX 4060 might struggle here.
I’ll probably still play Half-Life 2 RTX when it launches in full (no date there, m’afraid). If nothing else, it’s been a while since I’ve replayed Half-Life 2, and the demo has got me curious to see if the rest of the game might be more impactful for its visual changes. Curious and, if I’m honest, hopeful.
