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Half-Life 2 RTX

Going to look at it when I get home. I have been seeing some complaints going around about it. Whiney people seem to make it more interesting.
 
DogsofJune said:
Going to look at it when I get home. I have been seeing some complaints going around about it. Whiney people seem to make it more interesting.
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Yep, will play with this later tonight. I expect it to be playable even at 4K w/ DLSS Performance plus FG on a 4090.
 
4K DLSS Quality with the default path tracing preset (high) it's well over 100fps at all times on a 4090 using 2x frame gen, it's always over 60fps at all times with frame gen off, there is very little latency intrusion enabling 2x FG as well so may as well use it. Enabling the Ultra PT preset via the ALT+X menu drops the framerate slightly but it's still 60fps with FG off or100fps+ with FG on.

Runs and looks rather great:


View: https://youtu.be/I14YATMScgU
 
35.5 GB..... Taking forever with Google Fiber. Gosh!!


Trying it out on the 4070 box first. Ugh, have new Nvid drivers to update too.
 
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Seems pretty sweet so far. I haven't started an official replay yet, just tested out one of the demo areas (Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt are available without HL2 installed).

It certainly seems to look very good. Not like firing up an old game and running it in 4K where edges are crisp and smoothed out but textures are still blurry and low res like they were in the 2000s. This one's like an updated texture pack + the RTX from what I saw, but I've only spent a few minutes with it so far.
 
Has some issues. Some lighting problems in certain areas. The first time Father Gregori is seen up above, he's just clouded in flashing mist. Kids are home can't play anymore till later.
Does look nice though
 
Womp womp..

1742335644433.png


Every time I try to launch it. Is there additional configuration you need to do other than having the base game and RTX game downloaded?

Nm, I see there's a graphics driver update specifically to support the game now. Installing it now and shall retry.

Edit: Yup, you need new drivers for it. Barely playable on my 12GB 3080. Will be nice to play the whole game in a few years when I can get a 7070 for $1800.
 
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I have to say that the original with a cinematic mod looks better to me. The ray tracing just makes everything brighter and more orange it seems, thus removing the gloomy atmosphere.
The updated models are a nice touch though, funny how the "RTX on" pictures suddenly have much more polygons as well.

I'm one of those who think HL2 wasn't as good as the original so I never actually completed it, but maybe I will give it another go with this.
 
The whole thing, as long as I didn't touch it like try to take a screenshot, played great at 4K for me. Had a number of hiccups getting it running initially with a few RTX Remix runtime crashes when doing something simple like use F12 for a steam screenshot, or alt-tabbing out of it. If I just played it and only interacted with the Alt-X menu, it was fine. At one point my system fully rebooted while the game was loading.

4K, DLSS Performance (Transformer), FG on, RR on, Ultra preset everywhere else. Average dipped a bit further into the map but super smooth overall. Probably didn't need Performance mode but with the new model, it looks so good I didn't really care. Threw RTX HDR on as well and man, it looked great.

IMG_2502.jpg
 
how to get this demo? All I see is an Install Now option and Add to Library, but when I try I get the No Licenses error???
 
horse said:
no, that's probably it eh? But I mean I just wanna try the demo lol
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That's crazy. Most people got Steam because of Half-Life 2 when it came out. If you have a physical copy you can probably still activate the key on Steam to add it to your library. Otherwise the Valve Complete pack goes on sale all the time. It's on sale for a little under $25 right now.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/232/Valve_Complete_Pack/
 
Armenius said:
That's crazy. Most people got Steam because of Half-Life 2 when it came out. If you have a physical copy you can probably still activate the key on Steam to add it to your library. Otherwise the Valve Complete pack goes on sale all the time. It's on sale for a little under $25 right now.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/232/Valve_Complete_Pack/
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I don't though, never bought it but I did borrow a copy from my friend from the internet back in the day lmao!
DogsofJune said:
Orange box deal, $2

https://slickdeals.net/f/18176053-the-orange-box-half-life-2-portal-more-pc-digital-download-2?src=foryou_recombee&prop=rcmid-faff86aebc565e4caf7413515521e959&attrsrc=Personalization:Interspersed:True
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I don't even have $2 left on my credit card after buying my video card. Beroke as a joke for real...
 
Got around to playing through it last night. Took me about 3 hours to play through the 2 chapters the demo represents. I can see why it's a mixed bag with some. Out of the box, the performance was lousy. You have to go into the remix settings and tweak some things. Once I found the right performance settings, I got it playable. Not great, but playable.

This was exactly as I expected it. Just a visual upgrade. It doesn't change anything else about the game, not the level loading nor the physics. The models and textures are improved, probably what stands out the most with this. The RT lighting could use a bit more work. People complaining father Grigori looks weird with the lighting, and I'd agree.

Wouldn't recommend going out of your way to play this. Will it make me do a full playthrough when completed by next year? Maybe. If the demo is a representation of the full work, I don't think I'd pay more than $5 for this. If you've never played HL2, then sure.
 
Absalom said:
Got around to playing through it last night. Took me about 3 hours to play through the 2 chapters the demo represents. I can see why it's a mixed bag with some. Out of the box, the performance was lousy. You have to go into the remix settings and tweak some things. Once I found the right performance settings, I got it playable. Not great, but playable.

This was exactly as I expected it. Just a visual upgrade. It doesn't change anything else about the game, not the level loading nor the physics. The models and textures are improved, probably what stands out the most with this. The RT lighting could use a bit more work. People complaining father Grigori looks weird with the lighting, and I'd agree.

Wouldn't recommend going out of your way to play this. Will it make me do a full playthrough when completed by next year? Maybe. If the demo is a representation of the full work, I don't think I'd pay more than $5 for this. If you've never played HL2, then sure.
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Do you recall what the performance bottleneck was? or what settings helped?

Curious if it was vram amount related, as I booted it up with a 3090, and other than general long pauses of lag (assuming things were loading?) my settings were fine at straight medium. (fine being relative... ~40FPS in 2025 :) )
 
Whiffle Boy said:
Do you recall what the performance bottleneck was? or what settings helped?

Curious if it was vram amount related, as I booted it up with a 3090, and other than general long pauses of lag (assuming things were loading?) my settings were fine at straight medium. (fine being relative... ~40FPS in 2025 :) )
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For me, the bottleneck was by far and large the render resolution.

I had the Rendering on Ultra preset, because turning it down didn't make a dramatic difference in frames. Wasn't worth the visual tradeoff. Single digit gains for me, maybe. I have the 10GB 3080, and Ultra uses every bit of the VRAM.

Set DLSS Preset as Custom (Auto was garbage). Here is roughly what my framerate was per DLSS mode:
Ultra Performance: 60+
Performance: 30+
Balanced: 25+
Quality: 22+

Downgrading Ray Reconstruction from Transformer to CNN may have bought me 4 fps. I left it on Ray Reconstruction because it looked significantly better. I also left Reflex enabled.

I played through the whole demo on Performance. It gave me 30+ fps most of the time. I have hardware GSync so when my framerate got up to 40fps, it felt like 60fps. I can tolerate 30+fps under these conditions, but less than 30fps is where things break down for me. Obviously, Quality looks the best, but a 3080 ain't cutting it. There was a mild difference between Balanced and Performance. I found them similar. Ultra Performance literally doubles framerates. It looks like a washed out mess though.

I'm not even 4k. 3440x1440 is something like 66% the pixels of 4k.

Based on the numbers I saw, I don't think my old cpu held me back in any way. Similar experience with Quake 2 RTX and Portal RTX. This performs worse than those.
 
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Lol how did they turn two levels of Half-Life 2 into 44-88 Gb??? It looks great but come on!

Excellent performance on 5090.

I was surprised how much fun Nova Prospect still is.
 
Blackstone said:
Lol how did they turn two levels of Half-Life 2 into 44-88 Gb??? It looks great but come on!

Excellent performance on 5090.

I was surprised how much fun Nova Prospect still is.
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Much higher quality assets.
 
While some of the stuff looked great other stuff didn't. Really felt like a performance hog too, which is unfortunate for anyone who doesn't have a really high spec PC. Also still a bit buggy. Nice to get it for free though, don't think I'd pay money for it.
 
Furious_Styles said:
While some of the stuff looked great other stuff didn't. Really felt like a performance hog too, which is unfortunate for anyone who doesn't have a really high spec PC. Also still a bit buggy. Nice to get it for free though, don't think I'd pay money for it.
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NVIDIA created RTX Remix and funds it to sell RTX cards. There's no reason to have low settings or whatever since the base game has it and it's "optimized" for high end.

It's also basically a hack running on top of the game, so it's never going to be as performant as a game natively built to look like that. That's also the reason there are graphical bugs.
 
I think it looks amazing, essentially bringing a really good 20 year old game back to life.
Fixes have removed initial bugs and crashes and the lighting issues have been fixed.
I have a 4090 and the game is very smooth with DLSS at 4k.
 
Man I just finished HL2 like a month ago too lol. Might need to try and speed run this RTX variant. ;)
 
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