Black Mesa, the well-known remake of the first entry in the Half-Life series developed by Crowbar Collective, looks great with modded path tracing, but it also proves, once again, how gaming hardware is still not at a point where it can run even older games with full path tracing at high resolutions without upscalers and frame generation.
A new video shared on YouTube today by MxBenchmarkPC shows the game's Remixed mod running with RTX Remix path tracing, highlighting how path tracing, alongside the other improvements featured in the mod, significantly improves visuals, but also completely tanks performance even on a powerful GPU like the RTX 5080. In the side-by-side shots at the beginning of the video, it's highlighted via a performance overlay how the game can go from running in the 200-plus FPS range without path tracing to the high 30s, low-to-mid 40s range with path tracing with NVIDIA DLSS in Performance mode. As such, Frame Generation becomes a necessity to run the game at higher, more playable framerates with path tracing.
The Black Mesa Remixed mod, which can be downloaded from ModDB, introduces plenty of improvements to the remake of the first Half-Life game released in 2020. It relights the inbound train ride and parts of the laboratory, and introduces five new meshes including 2K and 4K textures, 10 new meshes that were only present as texture in the original game, 40 to 50 very high quality materials built from the ground up and around 100 materials created from the original colormap using a mixture of techniques and workflows. As such, the mod is worth trying out even without path tracing to experience a small portion of the Half-Life remake like never before.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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