The Half-Life 3 Project Borealis demo is now available, and the truth is, I really wanted to play it. I didn’t have time yesterday, so today I decided to try to spend it first performance test and be able to assess the level that this project has reached in terms of graphic optimization.

This is a fan project, so This is not an official Half-Life 3 by Valvealthough it does have company approval as it can be safely downloaded via Steam. The demo is free, but keep in mind that you need a valid copy of Half-Life 2 to play.

Half-Life 3 Project Borealis Requirements

The demo has a weight of only 6 GBand its requirements are quite high, although it is logical because it uses a graphics engine Unreal Engine 5.4. In order to play the demo, we need a computer that meets at least the following requirements:

• Windows 10 as an operating system.
• Six-core processor Ryzen 5 1600 or Intel Core i5-8400.
• 8 GB of RAM.
• Graphics card GeForce GTX 1060 with 6 GB of memory or Radeon RX 580 with 8 GB of memory.
• DirectX 12 support.

The device I used to run this demo is my personal computer, which consists of a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 64GB of RAM, a GeForce RTX 4090 FE graphics card, and Windows 11 Pro. I even exceed the recommended requirementsso performance should be very good.

Performance and experience after completing the demo

Half-Life 3 Project Borealis is a game that is very GPU dependent, but measures fairly well on an 8-core, 16-thread processor such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. In my tests, I was able to verify that saturation almost always exceeded 50% on four cores, was between 30% and 40% on two cores, and ranged between 20% and 35% on the rest of the cores and threads.

RAM consumption is not too high because during the entire demo It did not reach 12 GB, so if we have a PC equipped with 16 GB of RAM we will not have any problems.

The demo has various graphic configuration options that will allow us to adapt it to the capabilities of our PC. Of all the possibilities Lumen is the most demandingso if you’re having performance issues, I recommend lowering this setting first. You can also activate NVIDIA DLSS and frame generation if you have a GeForce RTX 40.

If you don’t have an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, don’t worry, you can use that too AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, because both technologies are integrated into the game. The developers did not forget about TSR, the default Unreal Engine 5 rescaling.

The performance data confirms that this is a demanding game. Even at 1440p, the GeForce RTX 4090 has to resort to NVIDIA DLSS to consistently exceed 100 FPS per second. As we see if we activate DLSS 3 (super resolution and frame generation) in quality mode we can go from 91 FPS on average to 177 FPS on average, almost twice the number of frames per second.

As for the technical design, Graphically, the demo is nothing out of this world. The geometry is very simple and falls far short of what we could achieve with Unreal Engine 5 with good use of Nanite, especially in the smallest details and in-game elements. Lumen’s use of lighting and reflections doesn’t achieve anything particularly noteworthy either.

Still, the setup is pretty decentwhich greatly improves the overall appearance of the demo. The developers managed to keep the essence of the franchise and made me feel like I was really back in Ravenholm. On a technical level, many things need to be solved and a lot of optimization work remains, but it is a project that left me with good feelings, of course It has potential.