Soon you’ll be able to don Gordon Freeman’s HEV suit in full ray-traced glory, smashing your trusty crowbar into headcrabs with realistic shadows and reflections, as Nvidia has just announced that a playable Half-Life 2 RTX demo will be available to download in March 2025. Not only that, but if you already own Half-Life 2 (and sort that out if you don’t), the demo will be a free download.
The launch comes as Nvidia announces that RTX Remix is now officially out of open beta, with a host of new neural rendering features on the platform. According to Nvidia, you’ll get around two hours of gameplay in the new Half-Life 2 demo, which will not only bring ray tracing to the classic FPS, but also a host of new features, including RTX Skin, neural radiance cache, and DLSS 4. I had a chance to play with some of these Half-Life 2 RTX neural rendering features at CES, where Nvidia was showing off the game, and I came away really impressed by them.
At a media briefing to announce the launch, Nvidia RTX project manager Nyle Usmani gave us some details on the new demo. According to Usmani, it “contains the majority of Ravenholm, which people are going to be very excited about. They have a lot of nostalgia for going through that very spooky locale.” That’s not the only map going into the demo, though.
“We also have a significant portion of a much later map from the game,” says Usmani, “which is the Nova Prospekt chapter, which at that point in the game you have every weapon, so this is a great demo for getting to see how all of these weapons have been remade with beautiful RTX effects in mind.” Usmani added that “you get into a lot of frenetic firefights with Combine soldiers and gigantic insect aliens, and it’s just a blast.”
Usmani says the demo will feature full ray tracing, as well as “a bunch of remade assets that look gorgeous.” As I mentioned earlier, though, we’re not just talking about simply adding ray tracing here, but also some neat neural rendering features. One of these is neural radiance cache, which uses AI to calculate light more efficiently to improve frame rates, while also making the lighting more accurate. I had a play with this tech at CES, and you can see on the paving image above that the shadows are more realistic with neural radiance cache (on the right), with much more depth.
RTX Skin will also be supported, which uses AI to process the way light bounces off surfaces such as skin, resulting in realistic translucency effects. As you can see in the image below, the headcrab is not only realistically-lit, but it also glows pink where the sunlight shines through it, making the veins visible.
Usmani also suggested that Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 could get the RTX Remix treatment. “As of now their [Orbifold Studios] plan is to focus on completing the original game in full fidelity… That said, Episode 1 and 2 share a significant percentage of the same assets. ..Speculating here… but I wouldn’t be surprised if some portion of them went on to complete the 10-20% of assets left for Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2.” However, Usmani clarified that “as of now, the plan is just to release the original game.”
Half-Life 2 RTX demo release date
The Half-Life 2 RTX demo release date is Tuesday, March 18, 2025, at 6am (PST).
For more information about DLSS 4, check out our full RTX 5090 review, where we try out multi frame gen and the new transformer model for upscaling. If all this talk of Half-Life 2 with ray tracing is making you want a GPU upgrade, then make sure you also read our full guide to the best graphics card, where we run you through all our recommendations to suit a range of budgets,
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