Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project is a new community-made remaster of one of the highest-rated games of all time, Valve’s Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2 RTX is...
  • __vEnglish
    302·
    10 months ago

    RTX On/Off feels really dishonest here given the assets swap as well.

    • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.oneEnglish
      91·
      10 months ago

      that’s just part of RTX remix and somewhat the point of that tool. After all you need to get proper RTX materials in there and why not upres the assets as well while you are at it?

      • riodoro1@lemmy.worldEnglish
        62·
        10 months ago

        Then id like to see the same better assets with rtx and without. Those alone would make an incredible difference.

        • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.oneEnglish
          4·
          10 months ago

          I’m not sure how easy that is with RTX Remix. IIRC the assets aren’t actually added to the game itself, but rather they get injected into the render-pipeline.

    • beefcat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      10 months ago

      You have to use new assets for these old games if you really want to make the most out of ray tracing because PBR materials are necessary to better simulate the way light and reflections bounce off a surface.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        10 months ago

        I disagree that you really need to put much effort into updating the materials to get benefits from rtx. HL1 RTX looks pretty great with only the bare minimum PBR remasters, because PBR and RTX are 2 separate things that both improve a game’s look. PBR materials help rtx just as much as PBR materials help regular rendering, and rtx helps PBR materials only a little bit more than rtx helps regular materials. All of the effects used in PBR materials apply the same to regular rendering as with RTX.

  • ieightpi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    202·
    11 months ago

    I find it hilarious that the “RTX On” is remastered assets and the “RXT Off” is just the original game.

    Id be more interested in seeing what the original assets with RTX look like.

    • TheFrogThatFlies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      10 months ago

      Or new assets with RTX on and off. As it is it looks like RTX is responsible for the new textures, which is far from honest.

    • czl@lemmy.noice.socialEnglish
      53·
      10 months ago

      Very wrong, without proper materials, light bounces would make no sense (if there would be even any)

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Wrong, if you just ported the original HL2 materials, things might look slightly weird but light bounces will very much be present and it would still look better than the original renderer. Light bounces (for global illumination) will happen with any material parameters. HL2 materials had bump and a kind of merged reflectiveness and metalicness value already, and if you ported them over correctly things would look acceptable (but not ideal).

  • SeismicNote@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3013·
    11 months ago

    So we’ll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?

    • NewNewAccount@lemmy.worldEnglish
      171·
      11 months ago

      That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.

        • icesentry@lemmy.caEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          Can you share any examples? I have yet to see an rtx enabled game that was unusually shiny. Most non RTX game already tend to have way too much specular reflection but the few RTX games I’ve seen were way better with that.

          • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.oneEnglish
            5·
            10 months ago

            Have you had a look at the RTX trailers of games? Most just show of how great the reflections are and barely anything else. It’s like " Look! We’ve got RTX now! See that puddle? Now you see yourself in there! That’s why we added more puddles!"

        • NewNewAccount@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          11 months ago

          Ray tracing is about implementing light and representing its behavior. Because reflections are, of course, a huge part of that it gets a lot of attention. Ray traced reflections allow things that aren’t otherwise on screen to be reflected without resorting to other clever tricks.

          But other ray traced features implement light in (my opinion) more interesting ways. Global illumination, ambient occlusion, and shadows can all be implemented via RT and because they’re not limited by screen space information can be more accurate and, thus, impressive.

          Light and objects in the world look like they belong and just look “right”. The way a sliver of sunlight can subtly light a room or the way an object appears grounded with accurate shadows can make non-RT lighting look wrong.

          Check out Digital Foundry’s video on Metro Exodus Enhanced and they’ll surely go into some examples here.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.

  • timconspicuous@lemmy.mlEnglish
    14·
    10 months ago

    I might be in the minority here, but I couldn’t help but think Half-Life 2 still looks really good for a game released in 2004. Obviously “RTX on” is nicer to look at, but all the small details like the magnifying glass that actually magnifies made me appreciate the old assets/graphics so much, what a milestone it was.

    • beefcat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Portal RTX runs pretty well on last gen cards with a little tweaking, I’m guessing we can expect the same for HL2.

  • Its_Always_420@lemmy.worldEnglish
    94·
    11 months ago

    Wish they’d do Hal-Life 1 with ray tracing because my video card might actually be able to run that one.

  • ErinCrush@lemm.eeEnglish
    72·
    10 months ago

    Remember the Quake 2 RTX version? Remember how no one played it? It’s just, not a good look, runs slow and just isn’t needed. This is all just to make more people buy Nvidia cards.

    • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
      51·
      10 months ago

      I have no idea what you’re talking about. Quake 2 RTX is my go-to recommendation if someone wants to see what raytracing is actually about. Not only are there some built in tools to fiddle with lighting but the end result makes such a huge difference that I can’t see myself playing Quake 2 again without raytracing. Out of all the RTX supported games Quake 2 was the one that blew me away the most. It makes bright areas bright and dark areas actually dark and you can see how light sources, in real time, change the look of the environment.

  • BigVault@kbin.social
    41·
    11 months ago

    I know it’s not the latest and greatest but I’m so happy I’ve got a 3090 to play this on. Can not wait.

    • shadowSprite@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      They sort of announced HL3 in the post credit scene on HLAlyx, but of course we’ve been promised HL3 before so even if we get it it’ll be another 10 years probably. Alyx was so incredibly good though.

        • Maximilious@kbin.social
          8·
          11 months ago

          Alyx is a prequel to HL2, so it can’t be part of the episodic release. There were some cliffnotes a previous lead storyboarder had released on the loose plot of HL3 some years ago. It ended with Gman retiring freeman and employing Alyx if I recall correctly.

          • shadowSprite@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Yes and spoilers (since I don’t know how to cover a comment)

            The post credit scene of Alyx shows you as Gordan at the end of HL2E2. Only Gman has now taken Alyx and you as Gordon are being handed Gordon’s crowbar and are told “come on Gordon, we have work to do”

    • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.oneEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, that was not really a good room to show off RT features. Most of the shown effects can be convincingly faked with modern shader techniques.