Half-Life 2 RTX Demo in Review: Beautiful, Demanding, and Innovative 5 comments
The Half-Life 2 RTX demo has been released. The detailed benchmark test shows what running the full ray tracing overdrive is like. In summary: the result is definitely impressive, but there are also limitations on GeForce. Radeon and Arc are out.
Table of Contents 1 Beautiful, Demanding, and Innovative Half-Life 2 RTX with Full Ray Tracing in Review Half-Life 2 RTX: This is how the game’s graphics are used to use the new full ray tracing graphics: what a difference! DLSS multi-camera generation: We need to talk! Neural Radiance Cache – the first neural shader in the Benchmark 2 benchmarks in WQHD and Ultra HD, as well as the DA closing word test system and the benchmark scene benchmarks in both WQHD, UWQHD, and Ultra HD. Differences in the frame rate of the Half-Life 2 RTX.
Half-Life 2 RTX with full lighting in the test.
About a year and a half after the announcement of Half-Life 2 RTX, a demo version of the project was released, which included the levels “Ravenholm” and “Nova Prospect.” The “RTX version” is identical to the original 2004 game, but technically, it’s much different.
But in turn. Half-Life 2 RTX is a MOD project in which the Orbifold Studios community development team of about 100 people graphically improves Half-Life 2 by means of Nvidia Remix. Ultimately this means that the entire lighting in the game is represented using full radius rays and therefore has nothing to do with the original. Additionally, all assets are suitable, so use 2 RTX half-life, for example, PBR (physically plane-based rendering) materials, in which objects have physical surface properties, without ray tracing not being possible at all. The polygon models of all characters have also been replaced.
What hasn’t been changed, however, are the levels themselves and the way the levels are designed. As a result, they are still from the original game and therefore 21 years old. The structure is therefore simple from today’s point of view and the levels cover up the details. This has to be done, because for everything else the developers would have had to completely repaint all the levels, which would have become a remaster than a “remix title”.
Radeon and Arc GPUs are practically on the outside
What should be clear: as with every game with full Raytracing, Half-Life 2 RTX needs a fast and modern graphics card. Additionally, sampling techniques and artificial frames for high frame rates must be used massively and AMD-Radeon and Intel Arc GPU are almost ruled out. These can certainly reproduce the 2 RTX half-life, but not at acceptable acceptable frame rates. Ultimately, this is only possible by a graphics card of the GeForce-RTX-4000 and RTX 5000 generation. The game does not even need to be started on all other GPUs.
Half-Life 2 RTX: How to use the game graphics
The game automatically loads the Remix improvements directly when Half-Life 2 RTX starts. The classic graphics menu for adjusting resolution and graphics options is no longer available; only the resolution and viewport can still be set there.
The Remix menu is opened by pressing “Alt + X.” It consists of the “General,” “Render,” and “Content” runners, with “General” being by far the most important point. Because DLS can be configured in this area: not only can the modes (Quality, Balanced, Performance, Ultra Performance) be set, but also whether the CNN or the new Transformer model should be used. DLSS frame generation, including DLSS multiframe generation, can also be set.
The graphics preset, the “Ultra,” “High,” “Medium,” and “Low” stages are hidden under the “Render” item. Additionally, post-processing effects such as motion blur and chromatic altering can be turned on and off.
The “Graphics Menu” by HL2 RTX Remix Fig. 1 of 5
With the “Content” switch, all of the improved assets of Half-Life 2 RTX can be turned off, either all at once or separately for materials, meshes, and lights. Even if everything is turned off, full ray tracing lighting is still used.
The Developer Settings Are Really For Professionals
If you wish, you can also call up the “Developer Settings,” which is important to know what you’re actually doing. For example, the number of ray bounces can be changed, or the new “Neural Radiance Cache” and thus the first neural shader can be turned off. Most gamers should simply keep their fingers away from the Developer Settings.
The new full ray tracing graphics: what a difference!
Half-Life 2 RTX strikes the perfect balance between the “original HL2 graphics” and modern graphics. You can immediately recognize the original game, yet everything looks much better. Much, much better. The new assets are immediately noticeable, as all objects are significantly larger and display much more detail than in the original. And in Ultra HD, you can now approach this without complaint.
The assets are well-made, but the real highlight is the new, fully ray-traced lighting. In Half-Life 2 RTX, this is particularly noticeable in absolutely every scene and also puts the lighting of almost all current games in the shade. Especially when dynamic light elements come into play, the lighting performs at a high level. The famous Ravenholm level at night with its numerous fire effects creates quite a bit of excitement on the screen. The combination of Full Raytracing and the new assets ensures that Half-Life 2 RTX, despite its limitations in the form of limited level structure and low detail density, still looks modern and truly stylish. The graphical focus is clearly on Full Raytracing, at least in the two demo levels, where it also performs very well.
If you’d like to see a brief comparison between the graphics quality of the original 2004 game and the Remix version, you can watch Nvidia’s video below.
DLSS Multi-Camera Generation: We Need to Talk!
Games with Full Raytracing actually place such high demands on the GPU that frame rate generation isn’t an optional feature, but rather a must-have, where you don’t really want to use artificial frames due to the gameplay. This isn’t surprising in Half-Life 2 RTX.
With a GeForce RTX 5000 graphics card, the new generation of multi-frame DLSS can also be used, which can place not only an artificial image between two rendered characters, but also up to three. In theory, this doubles the frame rate compared to normal DLSS MFG.
DLSS MFG is also the feature with which Nvidia advertises 200 fps and more in fully ray-traced games. In most titles, this also works well, but less so in the Half-Life 2 RTX demo. This is because 3× DLSS MFG and 4× DLSS MFG cause unsightly moving artifacts around the weapon area. Especially in relation to partially transparent objects such as grass or fences, there are sometimes noticeable graphical errors that interfere. DLSS FG had barely altered after
This has the effect that Half-Life 2 RTX is currently only unpleasant with DLSS MFG; the graphical errors are too pronounced. Interestingly, the graphical errors with DLSS FG, i.e., only an artificial image, are barely pronounced, although they still exist. But at such a lower level that the errors only become noticeable, unlike with DLSS MFG, if you pay close attention to them.
Neural Radiance Cache – The First Neural Shader in the Benchmark
With “Neural Radiance Cache,” Half-Life 2 uses the very first neural shader ever. A neural shader is a classic shader that also contains a small AI program that can be calculated on normal FP32 units, depending on the hardware, on tensor/matrix units (NVIDIA/Intel) or via WMMA design (rDNA 3, rDNA 4). The game uses NRC in full beam lighting for indirect lighting or bounced lighting. The AI program should be more accurate and at the same time increase performance.
By default, the neural radiance cache is enabled in Half-Life 2 RTX. However, the effect can also be disabled using a “developer setting.” Instead, the reservoir spatio-temporal importance resampling (RESTIR GI) is used, which has already been found in other full-fledged RT games. Here, the editorial team was naturally curious and checked what the first neural shader brings to the table.
Neural Radiance Cache (NRC) – One
Neural Radiance Cache (NRC) – One upload image 1 of 14
And in fact, the neural radiance cache leaves a positive impression in the game. The optical difference compared to the first neural shader is small to moderate in most scenes, but still consistent. And also consistently positive. With RESTIR GI, for example, it’s noticeable that the bounced light often doesn’t go “into the corners,” which works better with NRC, resulting in more uniform lighting. NRC also has the effect that bounced light coloration has a greater impact on the surroundings when there is a stream of light. Especially in Ravenholm, this is noticeable in the many fire effects, where objects in the “dead corner” of the light source are then illuminated by bounce lighting with the neural radiance cache, something that Resttir GI barely does.
With NRC, Half-Life 2 RTX runs faster in Ultra HD in terms of DLSS performance than with Resttir GI. The GeForce RTX 5090 achieves a 13% increase in performance with the first neural shader, which is a very good result. The GeForce RTX 4090 achieves 13% more FPS, but this also means that Blackwell can at least not handle the neural radiance cache better than its predecessor, Ada Lovelace.
On slower graphics cards, the NRC advantage is slightly greater. The GeForce RTX 5070 TI and the GeForce RTX 4070 TI Super both increase their Neural Radiance Cache performance by 17%. AMD graphics cards are currently unable to bypass the Neural Shader in Half-Life 2 RTX.
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Benchmarks in WQHD and Ultra HD, as well as the closing themes: Action Games, Benchmarks, Ego-shooter, Gaming, GeForce Graphics Cards
An engineer by training, Alexandre shares his knowledge on GPU performance for gaming and creation.
