Bilawal Bashir 
NVIDIA is planning to release Half-Life 2 RTX, a community-made remaster of the legendary first-person shooter with added ray tracing support. The question is, will players be able to run it?
Half-Life 2 RTX is not an official Valve project, it is being made by modders using tools released by NVIDIA. NVIDIA is looking to power interesting “remasters” with its NVIDIA RTX Remix platform that will let modders create and share these kinds of mods for their favorite classic games. Previously. the company released Portal with RTX and now it’s targeting one of the top-rated games of its era.
Any title that has ray tracing demands a high-end system. The same was true for Portal with RTX and it seems like Half-Life 2 RTX will also demand a beefy PC.
Can you run Half-Life 2 RTX?
Recommended specs for the Half-Life 2 RTX remaster are yet to be announced. However, for a stable 1080p experience, players will need at least an NVIDIA RTX 3080-equipped machine.
A recent RTX remaster, Portal with RTX recommends the NVIDIA RTX 3080 graphics card paired with an Intel Core i7-9700K processor and 16 GB of memory. Quake 2 RTX is another classic shooter released with RTX support. The game recommends a Core i7-4790, RTX 2080 Ti and Radeon RX Vega 64 Air combo.
Half-Life 2 was released almost 20 years ago on November 16, 2004. So the required PC specifications won’t be as high as recent RTX-enabled games like Metro Exodus or Cyberpunk 2077. Still, players will need a fairly powerful PC to run RTX-enabled games.
Who is making Half-Life 2 RTX?
Orbifold Studios is developing the Half-Life 2 RTX remaster.
NVIDIA gathered four teams that were already well-established in the Half-Life 2 modding scene and made a studio with them. The modders are not just including ray-tracing in the game. Orbifold Studios is rebuilding materials with physically based rendering properties that will accurately represent real-world materials in the game. Extra geometric detail is being added, DLSS 3, and NVIDIA Reflex are also on the table with Half-Life 2 RTX.
The remaster is in early development and is a community effort. The RTX update will be available for free for owners of the original game. Nvidia is actively looking for help, so skilled modders and artist who want to contribute to RTX remasters may want to visit the company’s site.
