NVIDIA is commemorating the 20th Anniversary of Half-Life 2, releasing a tribute video that includes an exclusive peek at the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX remaster. In addition, NVIDIA has launched the Half-Life 2 Anniversary Sweepstakes with a custom wrapped Half-Life 2 GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card.

With November 16th marking the 20th anniversary of the launch of Half-Life 2, NVIDIA released a tribute video that includes an exclusive sneak peek of the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX remaster. Developed by Orbifold Studios, a collective of developers who love Half-Life and were behind Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Rising the Bar: Redux, Half-Life 2 RTX is a community-made RTX Remix Project that will include full ray tracing, DLSS 3, and Reflex support.

In December we celebrated the release of over 500 RTX-enhanced games and apps. And now, we've already surpassed 600 RTX games and apps, as adoption of NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and advanced ray-traced effects continues to accelerate! RTX encompasses an ecosystem of technologies that make high-performance, high fidelity gaming a reality. Ray Tracing, powered by dedicated RT Cores, brings immersive and realistic lighting and reflections to games. NVIDIA DLSS, made possible by Tensor Cores, enables industry-leading AI graphics acceleration, capable of delivering up to 5 times faster performance in the most immersive games, like Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077, and Star Wars Outlaws.

RTX is also integrated in the world's leading creative applications, accelerating workflows by orders of magnitude, powering exciting AI tools and enhancements, and enabling real-time ray-traced previews in apps that previously took hours to render even a single frame. And the RTX momentum continues - at Gamescom 2024, we're announcing 20 new RTX and DLSS integrations.

NVIDIA RTX Remix enables modders to reimagine classic games with full ray tracing, also known as path tracing, and to update models and textures with modern rendering features that work hand in hand with ray-traced effects to deliver the level of graphical fidelity seen in Portal with RTX, our ray-traced reimagining of Valve's classic game. And with a few additional clicks, support for NVIDIA DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex can be introduced, accelerating performance and making gameplay even more responsive.

Following the launch of the RTX Remix Open Beta in January, we're today introducing new features and optimizations, headlined by the addition of NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, an AI model that creates higher quality ray-traced images for intensive ray-traced games and apps. Additionally, we're taking a look at some work in progress RTX Remix mods, and checking in with Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, to demonstrate the toolkit's capabilities.

PC game modding is colossal - over 10 billion game mods are downloaded each year. Mods enhance graphics as faster GPUs are released, extend a game's lifespan with new content, and expand their audience with total gameplay conversions. With NVIDIA RTX Remix, we're enabling modders to remaster their favorite classic games with full ray tracing (also known as path tracing), NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, modern physically-based rendering (PBR) assets, and generative AI texture tools. Starting now all modders can download the NVIDIA RTX Remix Open Beta, for free, from here.

RTX Remix has already delivered stunning remasters in NVIDIA's own Portal with RTX, and the modder-made Portal: Prelude RTX. Now, Orbifold Studios is using RTX Remix to develop Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, a community remaster of one of the highest-rated games of all time.

RTX Remix is a revolutionary modding platform to remaster classic DirectX 8 and 9 games with path tracing, NVIDIA DLSS, AI-enhanced textures, and user-created assets. RTX Remix, part of the NVIDIA Studio suite of apps, is composed of two core components that work together to enable modders to remaster classic PC games: the RTX Remix creator toolkit, and a custom RTX Remix runtime.

The RTX Remix creator toolkit, built on NVIDIA Omniverse and used to develop Portal with RTX, allows modders to assign new assets and lights within their remastered scene, and use AI tools to rebuild the look of any asset. The RTX Remix creator toolkit Early Access is coming soon. The RTX Remix runtime captures a game scene, and replaces assets at playback while injecting RTX technology, such as path tracing, DLSS 3 and Reflex into the game. Already, mod developers have been using the RTX Remix runtime from Portal With RTX to create experimental ray traced scenes in numerous classic games. To further empower the mod development community to extend Remix's game compatibility and feature set, NVIDIA is releasing the RTX Remix runtime as open source on GitHub today.