Gordon Freeman’s traditional poisonous crowbar journey is about to get much more life like, because the Half-Life 2 RTX Remix mission is engaged on including Nvidia neural rendering to the sport, along with ray tracing. I had an opportunity to play the sport with the brand new tech on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, and it appears rattling effective.
Most of the technical particulars of Nvidia neural rendering tech are underneath wraps in the meanwhile, however I used to be given a glimpse of what’s attainable with the tech in Half-Life 2 on an Nvidia rig at CES, and it actually brings out the advantages of life like lighting within the scene, not simply within the surroundings but additionally within the characters. In the event you’re considering of shopping for an RTX 5090, then that is only a taster of what it might do.
Let’s begin with the paving on this road. It already appears good with ray tracing enabled within the picture on the left, with the colours of the bricks altering in accordance with the lighting within the scene, and the shadows exhibiting the depth of the bricks. Nonetheless, when you allow Nvidia’s Neural Radiance Cache, on the best, the picture actually jumps to life, with rather more life like shadowing and depth to the bricks, and to the particles on the road.
The trick right here is Nvidia’s use of AI to work out oblique gentle. It mainly bounces the oblique lighting within the scene a number of occasions, inferring the data from the preliminary one or two bounces you get from path-traced rays at first.
It’s genuinely intelligent, and it makes use of AI in actual time to work all of it out – there are mainly a great deal of neural networks processing the sport information reside as you play, studying what’s within the scene from the pixels despatched to them, so when a ray reaches the cache it might infer a number of gentle bounces from the AI, leading to rather more depth to the scene.
Subsequent let’s take a look at one of many traditional Half-Life 2 headcrab zombies, which demonstrates the advantages of utilizing Nvidia’s new subsurface scattering tech to calculate the translucency of supplies and pores and skin, as proven within the picture under.
Mainly, this tech makes use of AI to calculate the best way gentle bounces off and thru translucent surfaces comparable to pores and skin, and it really works very well, even on a headcrab. Not solely does the daylight bouncing off the character look life like, however you can even see the translucency of the pores and skin, with it glowing a pinky purple on the again, and the veins exhibiting by.
This tech can even type part of Nvidia’s RTX Neural Faces tech, which goals to make human faces look life like to the purpose the place it fools the human eye, and avoids the uncanny valley syndrome the place individuals know a face doesn’t look fairly proper.
Half-Life 2 RTX Remix can be getting help for Nvidia Multi Body Gen with DLSS 4, which resulted within the body price going from 110fps to 202fps on the check machine we tried, and I couldn’t see any visible artifacts because of this. Each RTX Pores and skin with subsurface scattering and Neural Radiance Cache are going to be obtainable to RTX Remix as effectively, so we might effectively see different outdated video games revitalized with this correct lighting tech.
Within the meantime, try our information to the very best graphics card for those who’re trying to purchase a brand new GPU now, and browse our RTX 5000 information to see what’s coming quickly with the brand new Nvidia Blackwell GPU lineup.
