Half Life 2 RTX Demo Launched with Massive Visual Upgrades

One of the most beloved and influential videogames of all time, Valve’s Seminal Half Life 2 has just got an exponential graphical uplift that easily makes the whole game look like a current-gen release, complete with all the visual flourishes and advancements that you can possibly ask for–from fully ray-traced lighting effects to ray reconstructions with DLSS4 Multi-Frame Generation. The hugely anticipated demo of Half Life 2 RTX is finally launched on March 18, which is a free and shorter version of the upcoming fully ray-traced remaster of Half Life 2, so if you’ve got an RT-capable rig, you can check it out.

Players who’ve already experienced the timeless classic which was released around 20 years ago would also love the new remaster with RT-laden visuals. Half Life 2 RTX is developed by Orbifold Studios, the devs behind fan-favorite project like Half-Life 2: VR.

The demo features two levels from Half Life 2–the haunting Ravenholm and the tense Nova Prospect chapters, offering roughly 2 hours of gameplay in total. The full remaster which aims to introduce the classic first person shooter to a whole new generation of gamers, will of course include the entire game with super-high resolution textures, enhanced character models, new particle effects and fully ray traced lighting.

However, the graphical enhancements do come with a fairly steep system requirements for example the game requires an Intel i7-8600 CPU or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB of RAM, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with 8 GB of VRAM to run it at 1080p with 30 FPS. It’s safe to say that if you want to turn up all the settings to the max, you’ll need a much higher system configurations and perhaps a higher end RTX 40 series of graphics cards from NVIDIA. The release date of the full version of Half Life 2 RTX is currently unknown, though.