I know it's a bit silly to criticize something offered for free -- I'm glad it's there for those who want it! -- but I really feel like something of the original aesthetic has been lost in translation here. The before-and-afters aren't always flattering to the new version; everything is glowing orange. Darker atmospheres have become brighter.
It's funny how, in my opinion, whenever the RTX On/Off comparison shows up, the older has better mood, atmosphere and design. The "RTX On" almost feels like "Generic UE5 pseudo-realism On".<p>Based on other comments, I'm not the only one. Is "RTX On" the "bloom/motionblur/green filter" of this generation?
My main complaint with the original half life 2 was that the floors weren't shiny enough, so I'm glad to see this has finally been rectified.
The trailer (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31ISEd8xRM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31ISEd8xRM</a>) actually shows the old lighting has much more mood and atmosphere.. RTX is far too bright. Ravenholm is supposed to be scary!
I had Macs growing up and missed out on all the Half Lives until I finally got to play Alyx last year. I tried HL1 after that, but couldn't really get into it.<p>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.<p>There's also a VR mod for Half Life 2, which is supposed to make it one of the best games available in VR.
Does anyone have any details on how this was implemented? I thought that Source was a closed source engine. They rewrote the rendering pipeline using only the sdk?<p>Maybe they relied on the source engine leaks from a decade ago?<p>For some reason, I am very curious how this was pulled off.
For those wondering about AMD performance, I did some very brief testing. I have an Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card and a Ryzen 7800X3D running Fedora 41 with Proton Experimental on a 1920x1200 display.<p>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...<p>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.
The way nvidia plasters their name all over this project isn't right. I was led to believe an nvidia team was being paid to make this. But they have practically no relation outside of the underlying tech. They're so unclear about the role of rtx remix that I wouldn't be surprised i some people think RTX automatically "upscales" models somehow. Something about it is a step beyond how an engine dev would treat a game made in their engine.
Still nothing on ProtonDB about this - <a href="https://www.protondb.com/app/2477290" rel="nofollow">https://www.protondb.com/app/2477290</a><p>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.
By the time I got around to playing Half Life the graphics were so dated that I found it difficult to enjoy (that's obviously a personal preference thing...). I was excited, for a moment, at the possibility of finally enjoying what I'm told is one of the greatest games ever made...until I realized that I do not (and will not any time soon) own a 50xx series graphics card. I suppose a GeForce Now subscription is a possibility.