Half-Life 2 RTX Remix is the gaming equivalent of a magic trick in that it’s a mod that takes one of the greatest PC games of all time and gives it a visual makeover that looks better than any built-from-the-ground-up remake we’ve seen. It utilizes NVIDIA’s groundbreaking RTX Remix tools to transform Valve’s iconic shooter into a fully path-traced visual spectacle.
Half-Life 2 RTX Remix is a project that we’ve been following for a while, and it has the full support of NVIDIA and the GeForce RTX team. With the arrival of the GeForce RTX 50 Series of Blackwell-powered GPUs and the flagship GeForce RTX 5090, the modders at Orbifold Studios have already begun implementing cutting-edge RTX Neural Shaders into the game.
For NVIDIA, Neural Shaders are viewed as the next significant leap forward for real-time rendering, the first since real-time Ray Tracing was added to DirectX in 2018. From Neural Textures to Neural Materials to RTX Skin and RTX Mega Geometry, at CES 2025, we saw some of these effects in action in a live Half-Life 2 RTX Remix demonstration. And it was mind-blowing.
This wasn’t the first time we’ve seen Half-Life 2 RTX Remix in action, and it’s safe to say that even before the Neural Shader-enhanced version of the game, it looked incredible. However, these upgrades are transformative in what they mean for the future of ray tracing. RTX Neural Radiance Cache leverages AI, using a real-time ‘self-training’ model that learns as you play to trace a single ray and then infer exponentially more based on what it has learned about the scene.
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“Neural Radiance cache is an AI approach to estimate indirect lighting,” says Nyle Usmani, GeForce Product Manager at NVIDIA. “The way it works is that we train the model with live game data. So, while you’re playing, a portion of the pixels are being fed to a ton of tiny neural networks, and they’re all learning, and what they’re learning is how to take a partially traced ray and then infer multiple bounces for each ray.”
“This results in higher image quality, a night and day difference in quality when it comes to shadows, indirect lighting, and the way the scene looks,” Nyle continues. “It looks way less washed out. Neural Radiance Cache is the first Neural Shader coming to RTX Remix alongside the new DLSS ‘Transformer’ model for Ray Reconstruction.”
In the live demonstration, the Neural Radiance Cache and the DLSS ‘Transformer’ model improved image quality and increased the Multi Frame Generation performance from around 235 FPS to 250 FPS – incredible stuff.
Real-time ray tracing is hardware intensive. It involves tracing light rays per pixel to calculate reflections, shadows, and how indirect light might affect the look and feel of a texture or specific material. The more rays you trace, the better the ray-tracing effect looks, but the cost is exponentially more demanding on hardware. RTX Neural Radiance Cache is like DLSS for bouncing light around a scene, and in Half-Life 2 RTX Remix, the result is increased detail in things like foliage and brick, with the bonus of improving performance.
High-quality ray tracing and better performance? Neural Shaders are the real deal, and we can’t wait to see the technology make its way to other games.
Another Neural Rendering effect added to Half-Life 2 RTX Remix is RTX Skin, which adds translucency and subsurface scattering to flesh or skin. Using Half-Life’s headcrab zombies to demonstrate the impact, it’s impressive to see the light shine through skin and fleshy bits, adding to the immersion and horror-like dread of Half-Life 2’s Ravenholm section.
There’s still no word on a potential release date or release window for Half-Life 2 RTX Remix, but whenever it does ship, there’s no doubt it will be one of the best-looking PC games ever made. And, incredibly, it’s a mod for a 20-year-old game.