Half-Life 2 RTX(store.steampowered.com) |
Half-Life 2 RTX(store.steampowered.com) |
(I'd like to draw attention to posts down-thread from people who have actually played the damn thing, who seem to agree that the overblown lights are more prominent in the marketing material than in the actual game.)
Sorry if this doesn't add anything, I normally just vote when I feel that about a comment.
So it's different and a tech demo, but I agree it's not necessarily better and could be one the reasons it is free.
Or old games that oversold insane amounts of bloom[0] as HDR..
I used Alt + X to get into settings and decrease the brightness from 50 to 40, but even without that it felt dark, dark enough that I couldn't see anything down an unilluminated hallway.
It looks and feels great though, I'm excited for the full release.
My impression is that they were more interested in showing the improvements than being faithful to the original atmosphere.
Based on other comments, I'm not the only one. Is "RTX On" the "bloom/motionblur/green filter" of this generation?
I had a similar experience when I bought an OLED gaming monitor. It has perfect black, but when you go to play any game, they've all been lit assuming LCD screens, so blacks are really grey and the superior OLED contrast is basically useless.
Simply inserting the new tech isnt enough. The games need a redesign incorporating these new technological capabilities.
Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Developers Respond to Concern From Some Fans That It Ruins the Original Game's Atmosphere
https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-2-rtx-remix-developer...
>Temporal anti-aliasing is another form of super-sampling, but instead of downscaling from a much larger image, data from prior frames is reprojected into the current one.
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-temporal-anti-...
That said, Valve released the Anniversary Update for Half Life 2 a few months back which includes a bunch of quality of life improvements for modern setups.
There's also a VR mod for Half Life 2, which is supposed to make it one of the best games available in VR.
Try Black Mesa. It's a modern remake but very true to the original.
Maybe they relied on the source engine leaks from a decade ago?
For some reason, I am very curious how this was pulled off.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-half-lif...
I booted into the Ravenholm level and immediately got mid-50 FPS with no obvious stuttering. The framerate jumped over 70 once I got inside the first couple buildings. Those framerates are not ideal given the cost of my hardware, but I'd consider them to be perfectly playable. Or at least I would if not for the bigger problem...
The image quality was extremely blurry such that I could not clearly see anything over 10ft/3m away. There were no obvious graphics options I could change to fix this. I don't know if this is a result of some upscaling tech not working with my AMD card, a weird Proton issue, an anti-aliasing or depth-of-field feature gone horribly wrong, or something else entirely. Regardless, I'd consider it to be unplayable until the blur issue is resolved.
Even so, it was still really cool to experience and was plenty playable as-is. I'm excited to see the full release.
Anyone got it working? I have an RX6600 in my Linux workstation but I have been thinking about upgrading to play some games here and there.
Maybe not in this case, which may be a paid for nvidia ad. But in the case of a lot of mod/remakes, yes, they're done for free.
For this HL2 RTX mod though, my understanding is they had to add all new lighting sources to hopefully match the original intent, and looks like they remodeled many items and actors too.
https://x.com/mikeshapiroland/status/1874213952680607922
That's G-Man voice actor.
Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.
Keep all the new tech and dial the ambient lighting down. That would look way better.
Make it feel dark, uncertain and risky again. You’re not supposed to know what’s in that corner or that room before it comes lounging at you.
In the RTX version you can see everything in every location, completely killing any sense of suspense.
Back in 2D times, an artist could just set a pixel to a given color, and it would be that color, in early 3d, they had the ability to paint in shadows/highlights or control the texture colors directly.
With the physically based workflow, they had to author roughness/metalness and albedo maps, and were hoping for the best that the final result looked good in the game.
Nowadays with simulated light bounces, changing anyting in the scene could affect everything else, making controlling the final result that much harder.
Yes it does look better automatically, but at the cost of adding difficult of channeling the artists' vision.
At least in Gibberlings mod packs for the infinity engine games the extra content is non existing or optional...
But yeah, I tend to find RTX a massive waste of framerate for little practical gain.
Why do we really want to create value? I think we can all just be ourselves like you did by writing this comment.
There is no need to be sorry
Love the sentiment - knowing it’s ok to “just be yourself” adds value to others reading this. And often as not, what you say while being yourself is actually a contribution, you just don’t know it.
And now back to the half-life remake.
