At GDC 2025, Nvidia shared a progress update on the Half-Life 2 RTX mod, and part of that was an announcement that a free demo of the visually-overhauled title was coming on March 18. That day has arrived, so owners of Half-Life 2 on Steam can snag the free demo. The in-progress mod overhauls the graphics from Valve’s 2004 FPS opus, complete with DLSS 4 support, ray tracing, and enhanced textures.
The demo is roughly two hours long, and includes a chapter from Ravenholm and one from Nova Prospekt. Once it’s installed, you can test out the new graphical features by first selecting “New Game,” then the Ravenholm chapter. After you complete it, the RTX-enabled Nova Prospekt chapter will unlock, and you can access it the same way. A release date for the full experience has not been shared.
Half-Life 2 RTX, much like Portal with RTX, is a gorgeous proof of concept for Nvidia’s RTX Remix platform. Remix allows modders to essentially inject new life into older titles, remastering them visually with volumetric lighting, realistic reflections, ray tracing, and more. These effects, unsurprisingly, require high-end Nvidia RTX graphics cards — especially Half-Life 2 RTX, which is made to support all of the latest bells and whistles. Given that its numerous effects are very taxing on the latest RTX 50-series GPUs, owners of RTX 30- and 40-series graphics cards shouldn’t expect particularly superb performance unless you turn some settings down.
