I’m not going to lie to you, I’ve been dreaming of Half-Life 3 for almost two decades now, a game that unfortunately I don’t think we’ll ever see. I’m happy to see that Valve hasn’t completely forgotten about the franchise and that it still knows how to make good games, which we could confirm with Half-Life: Alyx, but without a doubt, this is the news that caught my attention the most. happy in recent days was the confirmation that Half-Life 2 RTX will be reality of the same month of January.

Half-Life 2 RTX open beta starts on 22th.Januaryso everyone who has a copy of the original game will be able to enjoy this new version uses the latest graphics technology in the graphics sectorand also uses new assets. The list of innovations that this title brings compared to the original is huge from a technical point of view, so I want to share with you a simplified summary so that everyone can understand them.

Half-Life 2 RTX: a huge generational leap thanks to RTX Remix

This game uses full ray tracing, a technology also known as path tracing. This technology applies to all light interactions, which means that e.gIn Half-Life 2 RTX we have lighting, shadows, reflections and refractions generated by full ray tracingwhich translates into a level of realism so good it will leave you speechless.

Even those who are responsible for this project geometry and assets have been improved to achieve a graphical quality that far surpasses that of the original game and that, along with complete ray tracing, leaves behind an excellent technical finish. It is obvious that all this will have a considerable performance cost, but this will not be a problem, since the game will be supported by technologies. NVIDIA DLSS 3.5which includes:

• Super resolution that performs an intelligent image reconstruction and scaling process to improve performance, which is supported by AI algorithms and accelerated by tensor cores.
• Frame Generation, which generates intermediate frames completely independent of the CPU using the AI ​​and Optical Flow Accelerator of GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards.
• Ray Reconstruction, an intelligent noise reduction that also works with artificial intelligence to improve image quality and performance, and is accelerated on tensor cores.

It will be interesting to see How does this game work and how does it scale? on GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 graphics cards. I can already tell you that the optimal level to move will be GeForce RTX 40 for its exclusive compatibility with image generation, a technology that makes a very big difference, especially when we have to work with full ray tracing.