Nvidia announces a community-made RTX remaster of Half-Life 2

First it came to Portal, now it’s coming to the Source engine’s other big classic: Half-Life 2 is getting a ray-tracing remaster thanks to the efforts of a community modding superteam with support from Nvidia.

Awkwardly titled Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, the remaster is currently in development with no set release date. Nvidia announced it today as part of its pre-Gamescom presentations. The remaster will use RTX Remix, Nvidia’s toolkit, for bringing ray-tracing to classic PC games. RTX Remix was previously announced using The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind as an example; it seeks to give community modders and hobbyists the ability to do ray-tracing conversions for old games, but it’s still only available to a few people.

The people, in this case, are a group of modders from multiple community projects who have banded together under the name Orbifold Studios. The team includes modders who worked on VR Half-Life 2 project Project 17, asset remastering project Half-Life 2 Remade Assets, total conversation mod Raising the Bar: Redux, and another VR mod simply called Half-Life 2 VR, among others.