Half-Life 3 Project Borealis is a game developed by fans of the Valve franchise. It’s not an official Valve project, but right now it’s the closest thing to a “real” Half-Life 3 that exists, because according to its creators, they want to stay true to the spirit of the saga and They will continue the story where Half-Life 2 Episode 2 left off.

The exact release date is not set yet, but A completely free demo will arrive at the end of the year which can be downloaded via Steam and which will serve to verify both the level of graphical quality they managed to achieve with Half-Life 3 Project Borealis and the level of optimization of the game.

Half-Life 3 Borealis Project It does not use Valve’s Source 2 graphics engine, but is based on Unreal Engine 5. It is one of the most advanced and demanding graphics engines that exist, and it is also one of the most optimized, so those responsible for this project will have to make an extraordinary effort to achieve a result at the level of this franchise.

From what I’ve seen so far, they seem to be doing a good job. The game looks very good, both in terms of setting and graphics, although we will have to wait until we see more real game scenes for a deeper and more thorough assessment. While we wait, and to whet your appetite, I’m sharing with you official requirements.

Minimum requirements

• Windows 10 64-bit as the operating system.
• Processor Intel Core i5-8500 or Ryzen 5 1600 Six cores.
• 8 GB of RAM.
• Compact graphics card with DirectX 12 Ultimate or Vulkan 1.3.
• 6 GB free space.

They don’t say which graphics card we’ll need as a minimum, but since they suggest we’ll need one with DirectX 12 Ultimate support, that leads us to GeForce RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 6600 at least, but since it’s also named Vulkan 1.3, it would lower the requirement and bring us straight to the 6GB GeForce GTX 1060 and 8GB Radeon RX 580.

Recommended requirements

• Windows 10 64-bit as the operating system.
• Intel Core i5-12600K or Ryzen 7 5700X3D processor. Eight cores and sixteen threads with higher IPC.
• 16 GB of RAM.
• Compact graphics card with DirectX 12 Ultimate or Vulkan 1.3.
• 6 GB free space.

They didn’t list any recommended graphics card in this section either, but given how demanding Unreal Engine 5 is, I think we’ll need at least one GeForce RTX 2080 or Radeon RX 6650 XT or equivalent play in optimal conditions in 1080p resolution.

I remind you that Half-Life 2 RTX is also in development, a very interesting project that will significantly improve the original game and will include track tracking support and NVIDIA DLSS 3.5.