At GDC 2025, Nvidia shared a progress replace on the Half-Life 2 RTX mod, and a part of that was an announcement {that a} free demo of the visually-overhauled title was approaching March 18. That day has arrived, so house owners of Half-Life 2 on Steam can snag the free demo. The in-progress mod overhauls the graphics from Valve’s 2004 FPS opus, full with DLSS 4 help, ray tracing, and enhanced textures.
The demo is roughly two hours lengthy, and features a chapter from Ravenholm and one from Nova Prospekt. As soon as it’s put in, you possibly can take a look at out the brand new graphical options by first choosing “New Sport,” then the Ravenholm chapter. After you full it, the RTX-enabled Nova Prospekt chapter will unlock, and you may entry it the identical manner. A launch date for the complete expertise has not been shared.
Half-Life 2 RTX, very similar to Portal with RTX, is a beautiful proof of idea for Nvidia’s RTX Remix platform. Remix permits modders to basically inject new life into older titles, remastering them visually with volumetric lighting, lifelike reflections, ray tracing, and extra. These results, unsurprisingly, require high-end Nvidia RTX graphics playing cards — particularly Half-Life 2 RTX, which is made to help all the newest bells and whistles. Provided that its quite a few results are very taxing on the most recent RTX 50-series GPUs, house owners of RTX 30- and 40-series graphics playing cards shouldn’t anticipate notably excellent efficiency except you flip some settings down.
