Half-Life 2 RTX Gets One-Hour Gameplay Video from Gamescom 2024 and Nova Prospekt Trailer from NVIDIA

Peter_Brosdahl

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It's been a year since the Half-Life 2 RTX remix project was first announced and the original game is now approaching its 20th anniversary so what better time to release a video updating its progress?

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Looks really nice, like a new game.
When did Jacob from evga start working for nvidia? Interesting.....
At any rate, this seems like a first class re-do. Cant wait .
 
Why would you bother putting ray tracing on 20-30 year old games? Again, its like putting brand new fake tits on a 90 year old woman. New tits might look ok and all but she's still wearing depends and putting her teeth in a jar every night. What's the point? Part of the game looks new, the rest looks like it belongs in a museum. You can't fix 20-30 year old textures and primitive low poly models with ray tracing.

I just don't get the excitement for this kind of thing.
 
I'm guessing that their age is what makes it an option to do so, the games run on a potato so you have all the extra power for the RT stuff.

Now I did only watch a small porttion of the video, but they did add new higher res textures to the game and remade the weapon models, not sure about anything else, but it seems a worthwile effort, might make me go back to the game like I did with Quake 2
 
I had an absolute blast going through Quake 2 RTX, and it was really interesting to see the path-traced light physics and play around with them. It was also interesting just to see how different the game looks from the original version. It was a nice change of pace. An interesting and fascinating technology demonstration and programming exercise. I also went through Portal RTX (which was real rough for me, I had to use DLSS Performance mode on a 1440p monitor just to get a playable framerate!), and that was actually less impressive to me. I was very "meh" on it.

I've been planning on doing yet another playthrough of HL2 for some time now. I've been through various versions of the game, with the last run being done with HL2: Update. When I found out last year that there was gonna be a HL2 RTX, I decided to wait for that. So yeah when this drops, I will definitely be going through it. It will be interesting to see the change in atmosphere and ambience for the environments. This is what has been the most interesting thing so far about the Doom 2 path-tracing mod.


Slag-King said:
Portal RTX looks super nice as well.
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I wasn't as impressed with that one.


Peter_Brosdahl said:
Let's not forget about Quake II RTX. I was actually playing it a little bit about two weeks ago.
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This was my very first experience with path-tracing, all thanks to you hooking me up with that RTX 3090! Still really appreciate it man!

Yeah I went all the way through Quake 2 with the RTX version, and then not long after that, Nightdive dropped the Quake 2 remaster. I wasn't in the mood to mess around with Quake 2 again any dang time soon. So who the f*ck knows when I'll get around to messing with it.


Dan_D said:
Why would you bother putting ray tracing on 20-30 year old games?
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As a programming experiment and technology demonstration. The simple geometry of Quake 2 (by today's standards) allowed it to become the first game rendered entirely via path-tracing, with an acceptable, playable framerate. It helped carve the way for both Vulkan ray-tracing and DXR, and helped nVidia develop their ray-tracing libraries. It was good programming practice for those involved to get their feet with with ray-tracing/path-tracing and the relevant APIs.


Dan_D said:
Again, its like putting brand new fake tits on a 90 year old woman. New tits might look ok and all but she's still wearing depends and putting her teeth in a jar every night.
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As horrible as the mental image is, your analogy still cracks me up!


Dan_D said:
You can't fix 20-30 year old textures and primitive low poly models with ray tracing.
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Nope, nor is that the point. The light physics are the focus. And you'd be surprised by how much of a difference a change in lighting and light behavior can make in a game.


Denpepe said:
I'm guessing that their age is what makes it an option to do so, the games run on a potato so you have all the extra power for the RT stuff.
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Exactly.
 
Dan_D said:
Why would you bother putting ray tracing on 20-30 year old games? Again, its like putting brand new fake tits on a 90 year old woman. New tits might look ok and all but she's still wearing depends and putting her teeth in a jar every night. What's the point? Part of the game looks new, the rest looks like it belongs in a museum. You can't fix 20-30 year old textures and primitive low poly models with ray tracing.

I just don't get the excitement for this kind of thing.
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My god, what's your thing with 90yo tits? :oops: :rolleyes: :p
 
Dan_D said:
What's the point? Part of the game looks new, the rest looks like it belongs in a museum. You can't fix 20-30 year old textures and primitive low poly models with ray tracing.

I just don't get the excitement for this kind of thing.
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Actually, with RTX Remix you can put higher res textures and models.
 
Stoly said:
My god, what's your thing with 90yo tits? :oops: :rolleyes: :p
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Only analogy I can think of that fits this kind of stuff. I'd call it turd polishing but these games weren't turds. They are just primitive graphically and sometimes from a gameplay perspective.
 
Dan_D said:
Only analogy I can think of that fits this kind of stuff. I'd call it turd polishing but these games weren't turds. They are just primitive graphically and sometimes from a gameplay perspective.
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BTW I'm not sure I agree with the analogy.

RTXRemix is a lot more than just adding fancy RT effects, as I mentioned, you can modify/add models, textures, add particle effects and even animations. You can even add DLSS and Reflex. It's the ultimate MOD tool. Even better, I think it just got open source, so surely more/better features and improved AMD compatibility is on the horizon.

So to go with your analogy it would not just be new tits, its new @ss, botox, lip fillers, drastic surgery, lipo, flattened stomach, eyelids, chemical peel, hair transplant and vag rejuvenation plus lots of makeup. So yes its still the old 90yo, but do you really care? :p :p :D
 
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Stoly said:
BTW I'm not sure I agree with the analogy.

RTXRemix is a lot more than just adding fancy RT effects, as I mentioned, you can modify/add models, textures, add particle effects and even animations. You can even add DLSS and Reflex. It's the ultimate MOD tool. Even better, I think it just got open source, so surely more/better features and improved AMD compatibility is on the horizon.

So to go with your analogy it would not just be new tits, its new @ss, botox, lip fillers, drastic surgery, lipo, flattened stomach, eyelids, chemical peel, hair transplant and vag rejuvenation plus lots of makeup. So yes its still the old 90yo, but do you really care? :p :p :D
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In this case maybe. But with Quake / Quake II RTX, the game is largely unchanged. They just added ray tracing and that's it. Half-Life 2 RTX looks quite a bit better as a result of larger changes.
 
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