Half-Life 2 gets the RTX treatment as Nvidia’s RTX Remix is officially released
There are over 100 DLSS 4-supported games
🤓 Half-Life 2 RTX Demo will be available to download from Steam for free
👾 It’s been enhanced with RTX Remix tools, including better hair, neural rendering, and ray tracing
📦 RTX Remix goes from beta to official release with DLSS 4 support and RTX neural shading
💇🏻♀️ Nvidia also adds an RTX Kit for Unreal Engine 5 with RTX Hair and RTX Mega Geometry
🎮 Nvidia announces new games like Tides of Annihilation and Mecha BREAK will launch with DLSS 4
📈 DLSS 4-support reaches over 100 games and apps
Half-Life 2 is getting the RTX Remix treatment to celebrate Nvidia’s ray tracing tool’s official release.
You can download the new Half-Life 2 RTX Demo from Steam for free starting on March 18 to experience Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt in an all-new ray-traced light. Orbifold Studios, a team made up of Half-Life 2’s top modders, developed the remaster using full ray tracing, remastered assets, DLSS 4, NVIDIA Reflex, RTX Neural Radiance Cache, RTX Skin and RTX Volumetrics.
That’s a lot of different technologies, but they basically add AI-enhanced shaders, hair effects, lower latency, and of course, higher frame rate.
RTX Remix goes gold
The Half-Life 2 RTX Demo is basically a showpiece to celebrate the official release of RTX Remix, which Nvidia released into Beta last year. The official release adds support for DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and RTX neural shading.
RTX neural shading is interesting as it aims to improve traditional rasterization by combining AI with traditional rendering to boost frame rates and enhance image quality, all while reducing system resource usage. Basically, it pushes some of the rendering work normally done by the CUDA cores to the AI Tensor cores.
It’s a radical rendering method that could help turn muddy, low-resolution textures into fine detail. What’s more, Nvidia is pushing neural rendering to be a widely available tool with Microsoft in a DirectX preview that will launch in April.
Unreal Engine 5 RTX Kit
At GDC Nvidia also announced it has a new RTX Kit developer toolset for Unreal Engine 5. The new devkit adds RTX Hair and RTX Mega Geometry support to Unreal Engine 5.
RTX Hair is basically what it sounds like, it uses RT cores to calculate ray tracing on hair and fur to give it more realistic shine and movement. RTX Mega Geometry, meanwhile, is a ray tracing accelerator that allows developers to use 100 times more lighting triangles.
100 DLSS 4-supported games
Nvidia announced a host of new games will launch and be updated with DLSS 4 support, including Lost Soul Aside, Mecha BREAK, Phantom Blade Zero, Stellar Blade, Tides of Annihilation, and Wild Assault.
Nvidia also claims that over 100 DLSS 4-supported games and apps are available now. DLSS 4 launched Multi-Frame Generation on the latest Blackwell graphics cards like the Nvidia RTX 5090 and Nvidia RTX 5070. The technology allows these GPUs to generate three frames for every real one, dramatically increasing the frame rate to 250-500 fps depending on the game and which graphics card you use.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
