After a 20-year wait, the Half-Life 2 RTX demo has finally arrived on Steam. This remake brings new life to the classic game with modern graphics technology.
A lot of gamers are curious about where this remake came from. It was created by Orbifold Studios, a team of developers who love Half-Life. The group is made up of members from different Half-Life modding projects, including Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Raising the Bar: Redux. While Valve didn’t make this remake themselves, they did give some input during development.
Half-Life 2 RTX gives the classic game a major visual upgrade with modern graphics. It features high-quality HD textures, full ray tracing, and completely remastered assets. It also includes NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation for better performance. The best part? If you own Half-Life 2, you can download it for free on Steam, thanks to a collaboration with NVIDIA.
Mixed Reception
Even though many were excited for this release, the remake has a “Mixed” rating on Steam, with only 59% positive reviews. A lot of players are frustrated with performance issues.
One Steam user, New Order, writes: “I cannot in good conscience recommend this. It’s a good idea to try and revamp HL2’s graphics (not like it needs to anyway) but not with this substandard optimization, it feels like it was only made for you to go buy the latest greatest Nvidia GPU.”
Another player complains about technical problems: “The amount of graphical glitches, ghosting, noise and artifacts is insane. Especially combined with the terrible increase in input latency using frame gen, it makes it unplayable. I have tried all DLSS models, all the different settings. This is pure AI slop and this is what gaming has become in 2025.”
The remake is free for anyone who already owns Half-Life 2, so players can try it for themselves, if they don’t mind the hefty 50 GB download. Hopefully, future updates will fix the technical issues.
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