RTX On/Off feels really dishonest here given the assets swap as well.
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?
Then id like to see the same better assets with rtx and without. Those alone would make an incredible difference.
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.
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.
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.
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So we’ll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?
That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
shame most people who implement it don’t agree
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.
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!"
Can you elaborate? Thanks!
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.
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.
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*Laughs in 4090*
cries in 3080ti
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.
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.
Very wrong, without proper materials, light bounces would make no sense (if there would be even any)
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).
There was a setting for that in portal rtx, I’m sure it will be in hl2 rtx as well.
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.
The art direction is impeccable and it still shines for it.
Two thirds of graphics is art direction, the other third is tech. Source: a rule I just made up
And those 2/3s shine through, the last big engine update for HL2 was in 2007. It still looks great.
To be honest, the biggest takeaway of the trailer is how well the original HL2 aged.
Wish they’d do Hal-Life 1 with ray tracing because my video card might actually be able to run that one.
Quake 2 RTX can bring my 3090 to its knees. You could do HL2 but I bet it’d be about similar to Portal RTX
I believe its because the RTX remix games are path traced which is alot harder to do
Quake 2 doesn’t use RTX Remix. Or at least wasn’t advertised as that being the underlying tech.
Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were saying. Performance with Portal RTX Remix was significantly worse than with Quake 2 RTX.
Q2RTX is fully path traced, it was the path tracing tech demo before Portal RTX was.
What? Am I missing something? Several comments here about 3000 series not being able to handle what was easy for my 2060 to handle.
Probably at different resolutions. My 3080 has to drop to 25% minimum resolution and/or sub 60 fps when using the dynamic resolution option.
That’s 25% resolution from 4k, which I’m not sure is 1080p or 540p because it certainly looks blurrier than 1080p at lowest res.
Portal RTX was “easy” for your 2060? I remember having to set DLSS to ultra performance at 1080p to get it above 30fps on a 2060s.
That’s 640x360 internal render resolution. Around 1/10 pixels of 1080p
Portal is one I haven’t tried, but my working assumption until now was that I would have no issues.
There is Black Mesa if you’re looking for a Half Life 1 remake. Not sure if there is raytracing in it though.
Black Mesa was so fucking good it’s ridiculous.
If it did have it, it’d almost certainly be too much for my RTX 3060. Portal RTX didn’t work too well.
Don’t worry, even with a beefy config it doesn’t run very well (talking i9 10th gen, 32gb ddr4 and 3080RTX) so I doubt even half life 2 will run decently.
Ha. What? My 2060 has zero issues with this, what are you talking about?
In another comment you mentioned not having tried Portal RTX yet.
I had zero issues with BM.
Ok? It doesn’t have RTX though, so of course it’s gonna run fine. It’s source engine after all.
They were saying it would run badly if BM had RTX like Portal RTX, because Portal RTX is already very demanding.
It’s not RTX but that was a fucking 10/10 experience. Xen knocked my socks off.
The cool thing about raytracing is it doesn’t really matter how complex a scene is. The bad thing about raytracing is it doesn’t really matter how complex a scene is.
If your card can’t run remixed HL2, it also won’t be able to do HL1
Good news then: https://github.com/sultim-t/xash-rt/releases
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Portal RTX runs pretty well on last gen cards with a little tweaking, I’m guessing we can expect the same for HL2.
I’ll be the one to be overly excited: GIVE IT TO ME!
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.
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.
You son of a bitch, I’m in!
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.
Awesome, really looking forward to this!
I hope they do the episodes as well.
Now they have to do HL3 right….right?
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.
Wait I thought we all agreed HLA is HL3 in spirit
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.
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”
What ever happened to Project Borealis?
