As part of its GDC 2025 news, NVIDIA announced that a free Half-Life 2 RTX demo will be released on March 18. Fans will have the opportunity to sample around two hours of gameplay of the work that Orbifold Studios has already completed, checking out the full ray traced graphics, remade assets, particles, and animations in the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt levels.
Meanwhile, today marks the official release of the RTX Remix remastering suite, a little over a year after its Open Beta debut. NVIDIA has introduced features like DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, RTX Neural Radiance Cache, RTX Skin, and RTX Volumetrics, all of which are, of course, included in the Half-Life 2 RTX demo. NVIDIA boasts frame rate improvements of 2.4x compared to the RTX Remix Open Beta, which only supported DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation, in Portal RTX, mainly thanks to DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and RTX Radiance Cache, although the runtime was also optimized and texture streaming improved.
NVIDIA also offered a look at how RTX Skin and RTX Volumetrics improve the Half-Life 2 RTX demo.
With a new Character Replacement feature, RTX Remix users will find it easier to remaster the original assets of old PC games. After working on the remaster in the Blender software, they'll be able to remap the skeleton in RTX Remix to get a properly remastered asset that works correctly.
NVIDIA said there are 150 compatible games (including Left 4 Dead 2 and the Painkiller Remixed mod), not to mention 350 mod projects being actively worked on by a community of over 30K modders. PBRFusion 3 is also now available to easily remaster materials for Physically Based Rendering (PBR). This new version introduces the following features:
- Custom fine-tuned model for better upscaling of lower resolution textures
- Custom fine-tuned depth model
- Higher quality Normal Maps
- Seamless Maps
It generates normal maps, height maps, and roughness maps. You can find a guide here.
As a side note, NVIDIA announced that there are now over 100 games and apps with support for DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation. They also confirmed the following titles will support the technology:
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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