Half-Life 2 RTX now available on Steam

The project is being developed by the Orbifold Studios team with technical support from Valve and NVIDIA. The demo version allows you to spend about two hours in the game, go through several levels and evaluate how the iconic 2004 shooter looks with modern graphics technologies.

The remaster uses full ray tracing, an updated global lighting system, improved textures, realistic rendering and detailed object models. All these improvements were made possible thanks to the NVIDIA RTX Remix toolkit – an AI algorithm that automatically improves graphics quality, implements DLSS 4 and other modern technologies. After automatic processing, the developers manually refine the visual elements.

As a result, Half-Life 2, despite its age, is graphically close to modern games.

System requirements

To enjoy the updated look of Half-Life 2 RTX, you will need powerful hardware. The full list of system requirements has not yet been published, but it is known that for a comfortable game it is desirable to have an RTX 40 series graphics card.

The release date of the full version of Half-Life 2 RTX is currently unknown. The remaster will be distributed as free DLC for the original Half-Life 2.

Minimum (1080p at 30 fps with DLSS enabled)

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10 or 11;
• Processor: Intel Core i7-8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600;
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti;
• RAM: 16 GB;
• SSD space: 50 GB.

Recommended (1080p at 60 fps with DLSS enabled)

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10 or 11;
• Processor: Intel Core i7-10700 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600;
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070;
• RAM: 16 GB;
• SSD space: 50 GB.

Ultra (4K at 144 fps with DLSS enabled)

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10 or 11;
• Processor: Intel Core i7-12700 or AMD Ryzen 7 7700X;
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080;
• RAM: 32 GB;
• SSD space: 50 GB.