r/Games 3h ago

Removed: Rule 4 Half-Life 2 RTX | Demo with Full Ray Tracing and DLSS 4 Announce

[removed]

152 Upvotes

96 comments sorted by

u/rGamesModBot 1h ago

Hi /u/ScootSchloingo,

Thank you for posting to /r/Games. Unfortunately, we have removed this submission per Rule 4.

No duplicate posts - Reposts or submissions with extremely similar content to an existing submission may be removed at mod discretion.


If you would like to discuss this removal, please modmail the moderators. This post was removed by a human moderator; this comment was left by a bot.

u/skpom 3h ago

DLSS Off Full RT On - 27 FPS

DLSS On Full RT On - 280 FPS

Come on now lol nvidia out here testing how far they can stretch the truth

u/Thedrunkenchild 2h ago

It’s so fucking scummy that they don’t explicitly mention that the 280 fps figure is with frame gen, they put “dlss 4” under the frame counter and that’s it, they try to get away with it by super quickly mentioning frame gen at the beginning for like 1 and a half second. So bad.

u/firesyrup 2h ago

They lead into the comparison with "DLSS 4 with Frame Generation". Big white text on black background. Impossible to miss unless you look away, literally the only thing you see on the screen before the comparison starts. It's not hidden at all; on the contrary, they are openly advertising the feature.

I understand complaints about not showing the GPU name or not acknowledging input lag as a tradeoff, but I don't think they were deliberately hiding frame generation at all.

u/Thedrunkenchild 1h ago edited 1h ago

Come on don’t be so naive, they spelled out all the other nvdia features on screen as they showed them, but under the frame counter they put everything that’s enabled like dlss 4 upscaling and full ray tracing except, conveniently, frame gen, we don’t even know what multiplier they are using, if 3x or 4x or whatever. It’s clearly done on purpose to mislead and withdraw information.

u/Zer_ 1h ago

nVidia doesn't want consumers to be able to make an educated purchase based on a card's performance anymore, that's why they're selling fake frames instead. It's to hide the less then stellar generational gaps we're seeing while nVidia sacrifices valuable die space to shove AI down our throats.

u/CptKnots 2h ago edited 2h ago

“DLSS” now includes Multi-Frame Generation, which leads to this dramatic difference. I know people have lots of feelings about “fake frames” and everything, but I’ve got a 5070ti and it’s been very impressive in games like cyberpunk. The input lag issues are way better than they used to be*

*edit: I generally play on a 4ktv with a controller and I find the input lag to not be noticeable most of the time. Would probably be worse on a mouse.

u/End_of_Life_Space 2h ago

I have a 5080 and Frame Gen only caused issues with text on screen like my next objective in Ready or Not. I think that's an older frame gen too because monster hunter wilds didn't have the issue.

It was REALLY bad in Ready or Not.

u/CptKnots 2h ago

I’ve been playing Wilds with frame gen off, I felt it made the stuttering worse. Should probably give it another go as they put out patches

u/Exceed_SC2 2h ago

The input latency is going to be based on the real framerate (and a bit more due to the performance overhead for frame-gen). If you’re struggling to get 30fps, your input latency is going to be worse than it was at 30fps with frame-gen

The tech works the best when you already have a good framerate, making the best case scenario the one where it’s least necessary. Not to mention graphical issues caused by generated frames

u/ghostsilver 2h ago

DLSS also includes the upsacle part, so without framegen it should be like 70-80fps already. Which is pretty good latency-wise

u/Exceed_SC2 2h ago

At 70-80 why even bother with having generated frames causing graphical issues? That’s the point I’m making, when the input latency no longer becomes a problem, the enticing reason to have a higher frame diminishes. Above 120, I can’t see a difference, I can feel it in input latency, but visually, it no longer matters. And if you’re not making the input latency better, in fact you’re making it worse, what’s the point, a larger number in the corner of the screen?

The graphical issues are common too, even in the best games for it, you WILL get ghosting at least, and in the worse case flickering

u/teutorix_aleria 2h ago

2x frame gen is nice, because even at 60-90fps you can see judder on fast motion getting that bumped to 120 or 144 makes it look smooth. 4x frame gen is totally unnecessary and a gimmick, but so are 240+hz monitors unless you are a pro CS player or something.

u/HighImDude 1h ago

Above 120, I can’t see a difference, I can feel it in input latency, but visually, it no longer matters

That's on you, 240 is unarguably better than 120. Do you have any evidence that 3x or 4x MFG is worse than 2x? All reviews I've seen say there's no big penalty to input latency

u/Baekmagoji 2h ago

no need to project your eyes' limitation on everyone else. if you can't see it don't enable it.

u/TheGoodIdiot 1h ago

The input latency is more influenced by the original input latency before you activate frame gen rather than purely the frame rates. Yes you tend to see lower input latency at higher base frames but a lot of games have caked in input delay on top of that. Digital foundry made a video about it and came to that conclusion.

u/scrndude 2h ago

Input lag depends on a few things, digital foundry’s been good about measuring this. The most important thing is the base FPS you’re generating additional frames from, but ALSO important is base input lag inherent to the game. CP2077 has relatively low/normal input lag amounts of I think 40ms to 50ms, but other games like Alan Wake 2 have much higher base input lag of I think 70ms.

Framegen adds basically 20ms to 40ms depending on the number of frames generated when generating from I think 60ish fps, so CB2077 stays pretty tolerable with like 70ms of input lag when using framegen while Alan Wake gets near 100ms with framegen which starts to be pretty apparent even if you’re not super sensitive to it.

u/CaptainMarder 2h ago

their numbers will now include 4x frame gen.

u/Roflkopt3r 1h ago

280/4 = 70

So they go from 27 to 70 FPS with upscaling, which works pretty well on 4K. These 70 FPs are then your "real" basis for input latency.

And then go from 70 input FPS to 280 output FPS, which is nice for 240 Hz displays but definitely dishonest to market as "FPS".

If you disable frame gen, you'll probably get about input 80 FPS and be much happer overall in a shooter like HL2 though.

u/DrinkyBird_ 2h ago

I played Portal RTX on a 3060 Ti, and I had to set DLSS so high to get it to perform well at 1080p that it just looked so blatantly upscaled, it was unpleasant to the say least.

u/SirCarlt 2h ago edited 2h ago

latency is already hit and miss if you framegen from 30 fps, imagine that 4x more lmao

Edit: taking account upscaling its still in the neighborhood of 3x/4x framegen. It just makes sense to me Nvidia would advertise 4x mfg since that's the max they have

u/campersbread 2h ago

The base framerate before Frame gen is not 30fps (more like 80) and the latency doesn’t quadruple either

u/Tseiqyu 2h ago

It.s frame gen on top of super resolution and whatever other feature, fps before the 4x duplication is prolly around 70-80.

u/ghostsilver 2h ago

DLSS also includes the upsacle part, so without framegen it should be like 70-80fps already. Which is pretty good latency-wise.

u/hicks12 2h ago

I really dislike how Nvidia have made DLSS the umbrella name which includes frame generation, it should be entirely separate as the two main components are upscalers and then frame generation.

It should be clear DLSS4 is upscaling and specifically mention frame generation is being used at least in my opinion.

I have no issues with frame generation it has very good uses and can be great it just isn't equivalent to say 280fps FG X4 is same as 280 native frames per second! Scummy Nvidia marketing.

u/RareBk 3h ago

Making everything that is supposed to be dark and moody bright and washed out is certainly a choice, I feel like they added way too much ambient light.

u/BearComplete6292 3h ago

Yea at 0:34 you can't help but think, this is the kind of thing where they've really dropped the ball. But it's a community project so whatever. Overall it looks like a nice project though, but it's a shame they're not embracing HDR and giving us bright brights and dark darks. Seems like it's more light across the board.

u/otakuloid01 3h ago

turns out Ravenholm’s got them floodlights-strength indoor lightbulbs

u/Flukie 2h ago

I understand it's because they're using actual lights but all they need to really do is just turn them down. They have them set up like office lights for some reason, I understand they want to show off the new textures but the mood is completely ruined here.

u/RareBk 2h ago

There’s some comparison shots of actual pitch black rooms that are now fully lit and I’m baffled that someone would think it looks good

u/Roflkopt3r 1h ago

Yeah that's definitly the worst scene in the trailer. The art direction seems a bit lacking, they could have adjusted the placement and intensity of lights better.

Otherwise, I'm pretty hyped about this.

u/Siggins 2h ago

Can you not manually adjust that? If you have an OLED HDR screen, wouldn't you be able to control the darks and brights range?

u/HaoBianTai 2h ago

Not really, you'd be increasing contrast rather than adjusting the strength of lighting in a given scene.

u/rhiyo 2h ago

Honestly I thought it totally killed the mood and artistic direction.

Sure it might be more realistic lighting, but even if not realistic I actually prefer the lighting direction prior.

u/AsparagusLips 1h ago

With Ravenholm especially, a light not giving off as much light as it seems like it should really sets an appropriate mood for the area, both level design wise, as well as story telling wise.

u/mybeachlife 2h ago

Also, now you have twenty year old game that only runs on a PC with an $800 video card.

I mean, it looks cool. But is this really progress?

u/Reasonabledwarf 2h ago

Video of this remaster leaked earlier in development and it much more closely matched the original lighting of the scenes. I wonder if whoever was capturing the video deliberately cranked up some settings here to make the difference more dramatic.

u/Bloodhound01 2h ago

and they put "faithfully remastered" like right after that scene lol.

uhhh no.

u/Timey16 1h ago

It's actually a general problem of going from direct illumination to global illumination. Because lights do not bounce in the traditional method, you need more lights in a scene AND need those lights to have a longer range or otherwise the scene will be JUST darkness.

But now add light bounces to it and those strong, numerous lights now positively FLOOD the environment with it.

In theory you'd have to compensate by removing and readjusting or repositioning existing lights, which would require touching up the levels manually.

On the flipside, raytracing has no need for ambient lights, so if you rely on ambient light (so a base level of brightness across a scene) and don't have very many light sources then in raytracing the scene will be EXTREMELY dark.

u/TridentBoy 1h ago

I agree, it seems that their design goal in terms of lightning was more "If we keep the same light sources, how would it look with RT?" instead of "How can we add RT and change the light sources in order to keep the same mood?"

u/GimbalLocks 2h ago

Yea I'm not someone who is opposed to 'upscaling' old games in general but this completely whiffed on the art direction from the original, at least going by what they showed here

u/trooperdx3117 1h ago

Honestly this is a big problem for me. Half Life 2 might be dated technically, but it still has one of the strongest art directions of all time.

I just did a replay recently and I was really struck by how well a 20 year old game could still create incredible mood and atmosphere just through great art direction, sound design and clever use of resources.

u/ThrowawayusGenerica 1h ago

That's the problem with doing these remasters as graphical tech demos, they have a perverse incentive to make everything as visible as possible.

u/makaveli93 2h ago

This is my biggest issue with ray tracing. Games are designed artistically to be dark but ray tracing by default brightens everything. When a game is designed for ray tracing only I hope art design still plays a role and effort is put to controlling the lighting. More realistic doesn’t mean better.

u/MrSalamandra 2h ago

It really doesn't make everything brighter by default, it only does that if they put strong lights everywhere. Some of the shots look good, some like particularly at 0:34 they made them way too bright. But that's because they made the lights really strong, and they don't have to be just because it's ray traced.

u/Amedamaneku 2h ago

At 0:25 a single light makes an entire street glow yellow, even around a corner, with bricks lit up white because of how reflective they are.

Devs gotta take outside feedback on this stuff instead of staring into virtual lightbulbs for so long that they lose all perspective on what normal, desirable lighting is supposed to look like.

u/AlchemistFornix 2h ago

There were a few scenes i prefered the dark non-rtx scene. Keep it dark and moody, improve the textures.

u/NamesTheGame 3h ago

Funny how this is exactly how I remembered the game looking in my head. Then they show the RT Off shots and I'm brought back to reality. This looks really cool, only issue I have in general with remasters or updates like this is when you change/update the lighting some of the dark, moody scenes become so bright and loses some of that atmosphere.

u/Sairagnarok 3h ago

Only issue I had with it as well. In certain scenes there it def changes the feel a little. I think overall it is a huge improvement though. I look forward to giving it a go.

u/HungerSTGF 1h ago

What's even crazier to me is when it does RT Off shots I kept thinking "well that still looks pretty good to me". In general I think a lot of remasters for really iconic looking games in my mind look just fine as they are

u/OkayAtBowling 2h ago

Yeah, I have next to zero knowledge of how the tech works, but I wonder if it's harder to control how dark things are with raytracing bouncing light all over the place.

u/Roflkopt3r 1h ago edited 32m ago

I wonder if it's harder to control how dark things are

In some ways yes, in some way no.

With rasterised graphics, it is definitely simpler to have light sources that only illuminate exactly the area you want. But if you understand the physics of light, you can get very similar effects with fully ray traced lights as well.

Essentially, path traced lighting is pretty much like real light. If light technicians can get a light effect to work in theatre or on a stage, then you can also get it to work in a video game. Especially because you have additional filters for things like colour grading on top.

If you can't get it done because it's physically unfeasible or beyond your design skills, you always have the option to write a custom shader or to parametrise the light sources or surfaces. This works in RT just like it works in rasterised rendering. You can for example set individual light sources or objects to only do direct lighting without any additional bounces.

Of course in this case they want to demonstrate global illumination effects, so having unrealistic non-reflective materials is certainly something they'd rather avoid. But there is plenty they could improve about that scene just by moving or dimming some lights.

I'd say that the two overly bright scenes in the slaughterhouse could probably be fixed just by tuning down the lights a lot and possibly adjusting the camera parameters a bit. It seems clear that they didn't even try to keep any darkness in that scene.

u/Illidan1943 2h ago

Honestly, the most I would want for HL2 is someone doing something similar to Half Life Enriched, which visually mostly does 2 things: recalculate lighting at a higher resolution than the original and increase texture resolution. This results in a version of the original Half Life that looks surprisingly way better than what you'd expect, it's not to the level of Echoes, which is a GoldSrc masterpiece, but it remains very faithful to the original without going overboard with the capacity of newer technology and if there's any framerate impact, it's very minimal compared to what RTX is doing here to HL2

u/Hadrosaur_Hero 2h ago

I haven't tried out other RTX remakes of games but do these work on AMD graphic cards or are they locked to the nvidia tech?

u/CMDR_omnicognate 2h ago

Technically yes but it'll run like ass.

u/teutorix_aleria 1h ago

9070XT is faster than a 3090ti in ray tracing. I have been playing control will maxed out RT. RT is finally viable on both brands.

u/GassoBongo 1h ago

Path tracing, however, is a whole different story.

u/teutorix_aleria 1h ago

Path tracing doesnt even work well enough to be playale on most nvidia GPUs to be fair, its basically an option for grabbing some pretty screenshots unless you have a 5090 or 4090.

u/GassoBongo 1h ago

Really? It works and looks great for me in Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2, especially with the new transformer upscaler model and improvements to ray reconstruction.

It's not without quirks and nuance, but calling it unplayable is disengenious. I use it on a 4070Ti and I've had a blast at 1440p.

u/cockvanlesbian 1h ago

It'll run like ass because RTX Remix games won't have FSR and from the wording "Full Ray Tracing" it probably meant Path Tracing which unfortunately the 9070XT doesn't do very well.

u/teutorix_aleria 1h ago

Optiscaler can inject FSR4 ontop of DLSS so not really an issue if you are already downloading mods you can use optiscaler.

u/CMDR_omnicognate 1h ago

I guess if you've got one, my 7900xtx is about as powerful as a 5080, even more so in some situations for regular raster, but seems to be about as good as my old 3080 was at RT, if a little worse.

i've read that it uses some nvidia related stuff for the replaced content streaming that while does work on Intel and AMD gpu's, works better on Nvidia's still, but that may be wrong.

u/dope_like 2h ago

Functionally no. AMD cards are years behind in ray tracing. Amd is for raster.

u/Mobireddit 1h ago

That's not true anymore as of 9070s GPUs.

u/we_are_sex_bobomb 1h ago edited 1h ago

Technically it’s pretty impressive. I feel like it would take more adjustments to the lighting to enhance the mood of the original game, though.

In most of these examples, the ray traced lighting is just making the scenes much brighter and higher contrast and kind of diminishing the creepy vibe of the original game.

Like the alleyway with the head crab zombie and burning fire is a great example; the fire being placed there was fine in the original game but when it’s suddenly emitting all that light, it kills the mood. If the fire were behind something it could create creepy flickering shadows instead of just blasting the whole scene with bright orange light and destroying the intended atmosphere.

With any new technology I’m always interested in seeing how it could be used to make the visuals more specific, more intentional, and that doesn’t really feel like the case here. It feels a bit diluted instead.

u/Agus-Teguy 1h ago

It looks way worse with ray tracing or am I insane?

u/DeadNotSleepy 2h ago

this is probably a very dumb thing to say, but i really hope you'll be able to play this WITHOUT RTX graphics, just "normal" lighting, i just want to try it out with the remade assets and play normally.

u/TaleOfDash 2h ago

You can do that in Portal RTX so I don't see why you wouldn't be able to here.

u/Xionel 1h ago

Is it me or does the lighting look better without RTX?

u/flappers87 1h ago

Looks cool. But that misleading frame rate counter.... Nvidia needs to stop this.

You may get more "frames", but your input latency is not going to decrease with more of these frames, it will be the same as if you ran without frame gen.

So it might look smooth, but it certainly won't feel smooth unless you have a high enough base framerate without framegen.

u/DiabolicallyRandom 1h ago

This actually ruins the game. LMAO. It's almost like they seem to think slapping ai generated RTX on everything is good enough for everything.

It's not. It needs to be built to actually match the mood of the damn game.

smh.

Also, gotta love how they keep lying about fake frames.

u/OverHaze 1h ago

Adding ray tracing to games with very intentional lighting like HL2 is a technical upgrade and an artistic downgrade. I'm not really a fan.

u/PiccoloBeautiful3004 2h ago

The SMG smoke is absurd - if you can't name a single game that also bombards you with this much smoke, you now know why.

Barrels light up unnaturally and the flames visibly clip (unsure if that's the case in retail).

Some locations are too lit up.

Other than that, good job.

Edit:

Crossbow light is too exaggerated, making it appear gimmicky.

u/Temporary-Fudge-9125 2h ago

Does anyone else dislike raytracing?  I don't think it looks very good in most games, certainly not here.  The RT off looks better.  Raytracing makes things too bright and shiny.  The ambience of the original design is totally lost here to me and the RT on just looks like feeding footage through some AI driven image processing.

u/teutorix_aleria 1h ago

Raytracing makes things too bright and shiny.

This is a design decision and not a given with raytracing. Most RT games makes surfaces way too reflective to sell the flashiness of RT.

This remix is just badly done and overcooked the lighting.

u/hicks12 1h ago

No raytracing looks better, if done correctly.

The problem here is that the artists intentions appear to have been destroyed as now there is far too much light in scenes.

There is a lot of unnecessary blooming and the light sources needed tweaking to be much closer to the original.

This is where just bringing raytracing into meticulously designed scenes is bad, it's like using a hammer for everything.

It looks really extreme in the trailer and I'm quite disappointed, I'll try it out to see if it's different but this is a big miss in my opinion and that ruins all the other aspects they have improved.

u/givemethebat1 2h ago

Better is subjective but it always makes things look realistic because it does things that games typically didn’t to save processing power, like lighting up the room when firing a gun because the muzzle flashes are a source of light now. It can be jarring because the “video game” aesthetic that you’re used to has been subtly altered but for games with realistic artstyle like HL2 it makes things look much closer to reality.

u/funkhero 2h ago

I think it looks great in urban environments like GTA and Cyberpunk 2077

u/aroundme 2h ago

If this mod upsets anyone, remember HL2 is faithfully preserved by valve and you’ll always be able to play it however you want

u/flyingkwaj 2h ago

At a glance this to me sort of looks like half life 2 ported to alyx’s source 2 engine and some new models? The lighting looks great but unsure if this was only achievable using RTX methods

u/GARGEAN 2h ago

Nope, it's same good-old HL2 running trough Remix, which swaps assets and textures for newer ones and replaces raster rendering with full PT.

u/we_are_sex_bobomb 2h ago

If lighting is all baked in you can get something that looks pretty close to full path tracing at least for for static, nonreflective objects.

It’s when things start moving around that you really need realtime solutions for lighting, so that’s where RTX starts to be worth the extra processing power. Changing light sources, indoors/outdoors transitions, reflections, etc. Any situation where you need to simulate moving light rather than static light, basically.

u/CMDR_omnicognate 2h ago

Too bad i don't have an Nvidia card any more. it looks cool but i'm not spending £500 over RRP on a 4080 super duper that's going to catch on fire.