RTX On/Off feels really dishonest here given the assets swap as well.
that’s just part of RTX remix and somewhat the point of that tool. After all you need to get proper RTX materials in there and why not upres the assets as well while you are at it?
Then id like to see the same better assets with rtx and without. Those alone would make an incredible difference.
I’m not sure how easy that is with RTX Remix. IIRC the assets aren’t actually added to the game itself, but rather they get injected into the render-pipeline.
You have to use new assets for these old games if you really want to make the most out of ray tracing because PBR materials are necessary to better simulate the way light and reflections bounce off a surface.
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So we’ll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?
That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
shame most people who implement it don’t agree
Can you share any examples? I have yet to see an rtx enabled game that was unusually shiny. Most non RTX game already tend to have way too much specular reflection but the few RTX games I’ve seen were way better with that.
Have you had a look at the RTX trailers of games? Most just show of how great the reflections are and barely anything else. It’s like " Look! We’ve got RTX now! See that puddle? Now you see yourself in there! That’s why we added more puddles!"
Can you elaborate? Thanks!
I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.
I find it hilarious that the “RTX On” is remastered assets and the “RXT Off” is just the original game.
Id be more interested in seeing what the original assets with RTX look like.
Very wrong, without proper materials, light bounces would make no sense (if there would be even any)
Wrong, if you just ported the original HL2 materials, things might look slightly weird but light bounces will very much be present and it would still look better than the original renderer. Light bounces (for global illumination) will happen with any material parameters. HL2 materials had bump and a kind of merged reflectiveness and metalicness value already, and if you ported them over correctly things would look acceptable (but not ideal).
I might be in the minority here, but I couldn’t help but think Half-Life 2 still looks really good for a game released in 2004. Obviously “RTX on” is nicer to look at, but all the small details like the magnifying glass that actually magnifies made me appreciate the old assets/graphics so much, what a milestone it was.
The art direction is impeccable and it still shines for it.
To be honest, the biggest takeaway of the trailer is how well the original HL2 aged.
Another free remaster to try to sell the NVIDIA 40xx generation, can’t complain. Even as someone not buying into this gen it will still be there for future ones.
Portal RTX runs pretty well on last gen cards with a little tweaking, I’m guessing we can expect the same for HL2.
I’ll be the one to be overly excited: GIVE IT TO ME!
Remember the Quake 2 RTX version? Remember how no one played it? It’s just, not a good look, runs slow and just isn’t needed. This is all just to make more people buy Nvidia cards.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Quake 2 RTX is my go-to recommendation if someone wants to see what raytracing is actually about. Not only are there some built in tools to fiddle with lighting but the end result makes such a huge difference that I can’t see myself playing Quake 2 again without raytracing. Out of all the RTX supported games Quake 2 was the one that blew me away the most. It makes bright areas bright and dark areas actually dark and you can see how light sources, in real time, change the look of the environment.
I know it’s not the latest and greatest but I’m so happy I’ve got a 3090 to play this on. Can not wait.
What ever happened to Project Borealis?
Now they have to do HL3 right….right?
They sort of announced HL3 in the post credit scene on HLAlyx, but of course we’ve been promised HL3 before so even if we get it it’ll be another 10 years probably. Alyx was so incredibly good though.
Wait I thought we all agreed HLA is HL3 in spirit
Alyx is a prequel to HL2, so it can’t be part of the episodic release. There were some cliffnotes a previous lead storyboarder had released on the loose plot of HL3 some years ago. It ended with Gman retiring freeman and employing Alyx if I recall correctly.
Yes and spoilers (since I don’t know how to cover a comment)
The post credit scene of Alyx shows you as Gordan at the end of HL2E2. Only Gman has now taken Alyx and you as Gordon are being handed Gordon’s crowbar and are told “come on Gordon, we have work to do”
Download link, please? I can’t find one anywhere.
(Also, how in the hell do you install these things? I tried to play the RTX remix of NFS Underground 2, but gave up cause I couldn’t figure it out. There’s no installer, and it’s not as simple as just copying files over…)
It’s not out yet, this is just an announcement
Well, cool project but let me see something outside of that room!
Yeah, that was not really a good room to show off RT features. Most of the shown effects can be convincingly faked with modern shader techniques.
