Half-Life 2 Path Tracing Mod is Looking Utterly Spectactular; Screenshots and Videos Shared
One crafty modder has been working on his own version of Half-Life 2 complete with path tracing using NVIDIA RTX Remix SDK, and the result is utterly spectacular.
We've already written about the potential of the RTX Remix runtime for classic games, allowing modders to inject ray tracing into existing games, including World of Warcraft, Morrowind, and the Half-Life games. From what we've seen so far, the enhancements of the visuals of these older titles are impressive, to say the least.
Yesterday, NVIDIA open-sourced its RTX Remix SDK, and today we wanted to share some screenshots and a video of RTX Remix in action within Half-Life 2, complete with path tracing. This video and screenshots are courtesy of modder 'Igor Zdrowowicz', and show to the potential of the RTX Remix SDK. The modder's path tracing mod is based on the Portal ray-traced RTX mod and is currently still a work in progress. Nevertheless, the enhancements to Half-Life 2's visuals and environmental lighting are looking stellar. Check out the screenshots and two of the modder's most recent videos of "HL2RTX".
Aside from releasing its RTX Remix runtime yesterday, NVIDIA released its Patch Tracing SDK last month. As covered earlier this week, CD Projekt Red released the 1.62 update for Cyberpunk 2077, adding the NVIDIA RT overdrive mode by using Path Tracing. It's an impressive update for sure, greatly further boosting the game's visuals. Ahead of the release of this new update, we sat down with CDPR's Global Art Director, Jakub Knapik, to talk about this major update and the implementation of path tracing. The interview is an interesting read for those interested, and we've included a part of this interview down below:
"All of the decisions we made paid off in our Ray Tracing implementation for the game’s release, and Ray Tracing: Overdrive is the next step in the evolution of the game’s visuals, made possible by the approach we chose to go along with from the very start", the art director told Alessio Palumbo when asked about the new Path Tracing SKD. "Still, many solutions we used in the past that did support hybrid rendering didn’t mesh well with the more clean, proper, and unified results Path Tracing was bringing to the table. So in many cases, working in the engine was like navigating a minefield and disarming the mines along the way. Overall, I think the biggest struggle was tweaking the system so that the highly complex world of Cyberpunk 2077 works in a performant way and the quality of signals is good enough for denoising to tackle it properly."
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