NVIDIA announced RTX Remix a while back, and we’re finally seeing some projects come to fruition, including the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 RTX. This is a full remaster of the classic Valve game with full ray-tracing, DLSS 4 and upgraded assets.
It looks glorious and players can finally put their systems to the task with a taste of what’s to come. Orbifold Studios has announced that players can download the demo for Half-Life 2 RTX later this month and see their remastering efforts first-hand.
Half-Life 2 RTX Demo Coming Out Soon
You can download the Half-Life 2 RTX Demo directly through Steam starting March 18, 2025. The demo will include Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt which have been remade, and relit using various NVIDIA technologies. Check out the brand-new trailer for the demo below:
You can expect to see the following features on display during this demo as well as the full game which comes out later:
- Full ray-tracing
- Remastered assets
- DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation
- NVIDIA Reflex
- RTX Neural Radiance Cache
- RTX Skin
- RTX Volumetrics
Half-Life 2 RTX will be available for free when it launches for owners of the original Half-Life 2. If you don’t own Half-Life 2 by this point, you’re in luck because Steam Spring Sale starts today and it’ll likely be down to a couple of dollars or less.
The developers highly recommend updating the GPU drivers to the latest ones before trying out the demo to get the best possible experience. We’re still missing the system requirements for this, but we expect those to be very high.
If you don’t have a NVIDIA RTX GPU, you’re likely going to have a terrible experience as this uses the feature set quite extensively. Like Portal RTX, I’m expecting this to push the GPUs to the max, and the demo should give everyone a good idea of what to expect from the full release.
If you’re interested in learning more about the development behind this ambitious project, check out the detailed insight article from NVIDIA which goes over various comparisons, performance metrics, and a behind-the-scenes look at Half-Life RTX.
Published: Mar 13, 2025 10:31 am