Half-Life 2 RTX demo launches on Steam: What your PC needs to play

Half Life 2 RTX

A demo of Half-Life 2 RTX, an upcoming community-made mod/DLC, has launched on Steam. If you are a Half-Life old-timer and wish to revisit a graphically enhanced version of the classic first-person shooter, you must have at least a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card (with DLSS switched on) on your PC. Also, other minimum system requirements to play the Half-Life 2 RTX demo are an Intel Core-i7 8600/AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor, 64-bit Windows 11/10, 16GB RAM and 50GB SSD space. Nvidia recommends “a GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics card, though there are plenty of settings available to ensure a great experience on previous-generation GPUs, too”. Also, to play the Half-Life 2 RTX demo, you must own a copy of Half-Life 2.

The Half-Life 2 RTX DLC is being developed by Orbifold Studios, the team behind Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17 and Raising the Bar: Redux. The game will launch “at a later date”, Nvidia said in a website post.

Nvidia also announced the launch of the RTX Remix, which comes with new features like DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, RTX Neural Rendering technologies, AI-powered tools, and “many community-requested changes that will enable modders to improve their remasters, increase image quality, and further accelerate performance,” Nvidia said. Half-Life 2 RTX uses the latest version of RTX Remix.

The Half-Life 2 RTX DLC is a full graphical overhaul of Half-Life 2 with “full ray tracing, new hand-crafted, physically based textures, enhanced high-poly models, and updated lighting, all in stunning 4K,” said the developers in the Steam description of the demo. Nvidia says that he development team at Orbifold Studios is “updating every texture, model, and level, adding extra geometric detail to buildings and surfaces to realistically interact with fully ray-traced lighting. Even particles and animations are being revitalized to bring Half-Life 2 to modern graphical standards”.