Half-Life 2 RTX and all of its foggy, ray-traced lighting is getting a demo next week
The long awaited Half-Life 2 RTX mod still doesn't have a release date, but it is getting a demo so you can try it for yourself soon.
Ray tracing is cool but the screenshots in the video just destroy the atmosphere by making everything day bright.
Agreed. In the video a lot of the “RTX Off” scenes look better IMO.
I feel this way about a lot of RTX implementations.
Yeah it's technically better (crisper, higher res, etc) but the visual language is totally different and IMO worse. That fire just doesn't look as hot, for example.
Lighting as an art form is highly coupled with the given tech. Something as small as just changing the shadow method can require artists relighting a whole game. My guess is they aren't doing this or maybe are pushing the stark lighting the same way depth of field, colored lights, lens flares etc got juiced in previous generations.
That's always wrong. The tech should service the art, not the other way around.
So this might be a stupid question considering how tied to Nvidia it seems to be, but... will run on the new AMD 90-series cards that can actually do ray-tracing?
Sure it will. It will probably run like a 2080 TI or 3070 though. The ray tracing performance of AMD isn't stellar. At least they got their shit together and got a AI rescaler that competes with DLSS.
This looks great, I wonder if it's possible for all this DLSS and similar tech to get rid of severe input lag. No matter how good it looks, I wouldn't play a shooter with input lag.
Well as long as you don't turn on frame gen, the input lag shouldn't be much higher than normal. There's also NVidia reflex, which can shave a few milliseconds off input lag
There shouldn't be any additional input lag. DLSS and frame gen have some but to most people it's not noticeable since it's like 10ms.
Frame gen introduce input lag due to interpolation, DLSS shouldn't produce any input lag as far as I'm aware.
So who's actually developing it? If it was Valve they would have said...
I already own HL2, but presumably I would have to buy this anew.
It's a community project with support from Valve and Nvidia
if only this could release on consoles
Waaahhh but I hate Ray TraCing.
