There’s no doubt that the PC is the modding platform, not just when it comes to hardware, but in games as well, and that’s something NVIDIA knows, which hasn’t been shy about launching the one of the best ideas in its RTX 40. in recent years and it will have us seeing endless remakes of classic PC games with Ray Tracing. Something that has helped users launch ray-traced versions of classic games, including Half Life 2 with Path Tracingand the truth is that it looks spectacular.
What if we told you that only one person worked on the Path Traced version of Half-Life 2 using NVIDIA’s RTX Remix? Most likely, you would believe us about this claim, but it would be much more doubtful for many if we were talking about the result, to say the least spectacular. And it is that the work of Igor Zdrowowicz, which was made possible thanks to the previous existence of Portal RTX, demonstrates very well how lighting in games has been the great pending task in the two last decades.
Half-Life 2 key with Path Tracing is RTX Remix
NVIDIA published the code for its RTX Remix yesterday, and believe us that this will revolutionize the market for game mods, especially those classics that will be visually renewed without the development studio having to launch a remake of the game to support Ray Tracing and Path Tracing, especially with the latter. And it is that the next step for NVIDIA to say goodbye to rasterization is to remove lighting control from the game and now it’s all about ray tracing. And it is that one of the capabilities that Deep Learning allows is to learn what direct lighting looks like through rasterization to create an equivalent for Ray Tracing or Path Tracing.
The big difference compared to the technique used so far is that the light rays leave the primary light sources and pass through the scene until they disappear or leave the scene. In contrast, with the Ray Tracing we had so far, only indirectly generated lighting was calculated, which meant it wasn’t fully accurate. However, there is the problem that applying 100% ray-traced lighting from the get-go can lead to games art breaking completely.
So with RTX Remix the system learns the lighting of the game to reconstruct it as artistically close as it was to the original game and it doesn’t break its original aesthetic and the mods that appear are at least visually spectacular.
The game looks spectacular and we’re not exaggerating
For those who say that Ray Tracing does not bring anything, we leave you some videos apart from the Half-Life 2 image gallery with Path Tracing. It makes us want to grab our RTX 40 and get back to playing Valve’s classic, one of the best games in history.
With this, it is more than “confirmed” that ray tracing is something totally useless that brings nothing to games, not even visually. And believe us that it will not be the last that we will see as impressive thanks to its renewed lighting among the various classic PC games. How about Doom 3 with Path Tracing for example?
