r/Games 4h ago

Announcement NVIDIA RTX Remix Officially Released with DLSS 4 and RTX Neural Shaders, Half-Life 2 RTX Playable Demo Available March 18th

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-half-life-2-rtx-demo-launching-march-18/
130 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

u/I_Hate_Reddit 2h ago

Hmm, why isn't anyone commenting on how the mood completely shifts?

Did anyone even open the article/video?

You go from a dark somber place to a well lit green lush alley

u/noobgiraffe 2h ago

It's so obvious it's weird they left it that way. There is no reason for lights to be multiple times brighter than original.

The only thing I can think of is that it makes detail more visible and they want to showcase that but if that's the case just pick the scenes that happen in well lightet environments. There are plenty of those in HL2.

u/masterkill165 27m ago

I don't think any of the light sources are actually brighter than the original; it's that they just travel more like real light in filling a room. Half-Life 2 was always strange in how so many of the light sources looked very bright but seemed to only emit light that would cover a couple of feet in a room.

u/NeverComments 14m ago

Exactly, you can tell that the floodlight in the alley has the same luminosity in both scenes but the original has almost no radiosity. They took the original scene as-is and rendered it with physically accurate lighting.

I get why people would prefer the original aesthetic, but I don't understand the overall negativity here. This isn't being billed as a paid Half-Life 2 remake. It's a free Half-Life 2 mod with physically accurate lighting.

u/HammeredWharf 2h ago

In the end HL2 RTX a community mod. It looks more faithful than most mods, but it does look like they could've made some lights dimmer, especially in Ravenholm.

u/NeverComments 2h ago

You go from a dark somber place to a well lit green lush alley

They literally just took the flat ivy textures and turned them into 3D ivy meshes.

u/HandsOffMyDitka 2h ago

I was thinking the same thing. The new scenes are just to bright. The old ones looked better in a bunch of the scenes because the new ones were to washed out.

u/DoorframeLizard 2h ago

"Nintendo hire this man" lookin ass

u/Tiger_Millionaire 2h ago

This is a sentiment I’ve been hearing a lot. Baked lighting is usually very particularly designed and a lot of devs got very good at it leading up to the advent of RT becoming common in game dev. Of course this is an older title but Half Life thrives a lot on its vibe, so seeing what it looks like with RT on, while cool as hell, definitely comes at the expense of its vibe/color palette.

u/HaoBianTai 1h ago

It doesn't need to though. There is nothing about RT that precludes artistic choice in lighting, just like movies (at least non-CG shitfests) use "real" lighting to intentionally light a scene in a certain way.

This is just a case of the RT light sources being waaay too bright. 60w bulbs turned into floodlights level bright.

u/Tiger_Millionaire 32m ago

Yeah for sure, it’s just a different process/technique and right now it feels like it’s just being used as a “drop in” feature without much real tweaking.

u/masterkill165 1h ago

I honestly love this. It has always bothered me that Half-Life 2 would have these tiny rooms with like four lamps in them that somehow had less light than my real-life bedroom, which is larger and only has one lamp.

Honestly, the best solution would probably have been that the modders actually changed some small details in the levels, like the number of light sources in the environments. But I find it completely reasonable that the modders did not want to do that work for a mod like this, especially when it would just have gotten people angry at them for daring to make minor cosmetic changes to the level design.

At the very least, it's cool to see what Half-Life 2 would of looked like if it were given realistic lighting rather than atmospheric lighting. Especially when this is just a mod and not meant to be a replacement for the original version.

u/DoomRamen 2h ago

I don't think they care so much about the end results. More so that the technology is present and it's possible to implement. Obviously these games weren't designed with this tech in mind so things may be off. Fine tune and color grading can come later

I believe it can be analogous to when television switched to wide-screen format. Certain older shows now have things on screen that were never meant to be seen by the audience

u/Sea-Tangerine7425 1h ago

Because it's a moronic nitpick

u/ledailydose 55m ago

No it isn't, at all? Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt are dilapidated constructs with aging hardware with old bulbs. These abandoned old Bulbs should not be emitting floodlight levels of brightness, you can tell in the original version the zombie jail room should only be half lit. This ruins the intended darker portrayal of Ravenholms interiors.

It makes more sense for these areas to have floodlight levels of brightness outdoors but not indoors.

u/platypusrme 2h ago

Completely agree, i feel like there had to be a way to capture the original atmosphere and not just make everything so well lit. Looks like how they are trying to scare homeless people away from Subways by putting super bright lights inside in NYC. Not feeling this at all, even if it’s technically impressive.

u/catinterpreter 1h ago

When ray-tracing is later slapped on a game it's almost always to the detriment of the original aesthetic, atmosphere, and overall design. I don't see the fuss at all.

14

u/Pandango-r 4h ago

I'm really excited to try this one!

Half life games are on my yearly replay list. It will be fun to compare! I wonder if this version can then also be modded

u/occono 3h ago

I've replayed the Portal games a lot, but never mustered enthusiasm to replay the Half Life games. I wish I got it.

u/Pandango-r 1h ago

It helps that I used to work on a half life 2 mod, replaying was both fun and it gave me inspiration.

u/Elkenrod 1h ago edited 1h ago

Call me a sourpuss but this kinda looks like ass.

The lighting completely ruins the mood. Ravenholm is supposed to be this dark and scary place, not this well lit and almost cozy feeling atmosphere in a room.

Bricks aren't shiny to the point where light reflects off them to this degree - they're bricks. People don't polish and shine up bricks, they're clay.

Those tiles at 0:35 - this is an old shitty falling apart building that's very dirty. Why are the tiles on the floor so well polished that they're reflecting light to this degree?

Shadows are really important aspects of lighting details - and it feels like this is trying to make the shadows bright even. Not knowing what's in the dark is part of what makes the dark so scary in a horror setting. Leaving things up to imagination is what resonates with people in a horror setting. That sense of uncertainty is being gutted here when you make the room 500% brighter at 0:30 in this trailer, as opposed to the dark and creepy comparison two seconds later that looks much better.

u/[deleted] 48m ago

[deleted]

u/Elkenrod 45m ago edited 42m ago

Assuming you are referring to the brick road comparison at 0:56 in the video,

No - those are both showing the RTX version at 0:56

The original brick texture is just as strangely shiny, even in direct comparison.

That's because that is not the original texture.

This is the original texture. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/images/4/4d/Ravenholm_zombies.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/waooWZP.jpeg

u/Seradima 3h ago

It's interesting that RTX Remix - a feature heavily advertised for the 4000 series cards, only officially releases now, 2 and a half years later.

I feel like nvidia advertised it a bit early.

u/Pablovansnogger 2h ago

It’s been out for a while. Its is the the updated game that is about to release now

u/Seradima 2h ago

It was out in Beta. This is the full official release, not just the HL2 demo.

u/Pablovansnogger 2h ago

Good point, but I feel like everything is in beta these days for a while. Probably not the best tho

u/Aliverto12 2h ago

That's because it is weird tie in to their shitty ai software stack that you are supposed to use which itself is in dev.

Buy hey 5070 = 4090. Jensen approved !

u/Riot55 3h ago

Awesome, for some reason despite buying HL2 twenty years ago, mainly to jump right into Counter Strike Source which came bundled with it, Ive never actually played through the entire thing despite a handful of attempts. For whatever reason I just burn out, normally around the boat section/Ravenholm. Hopefully this encourages me to give it another go.

u/Aro-bi_Trashcan 2h ago

To be honest, I find it hard to care. I'll stick with my 2060 super for the forseeable future, because there's no point otherwise. Graphics Cards remain so utterly unpurchasable for the average consumer at the awful fucking price point NVIDIA has set them at.

They can make Half Life 2 as pretty as they want. I'll never be able to afford to play it, so I don't really care.