There is no doubt that the PC is the platform for modding, not only with respect to hardware, but also in games, and this is something that NVIDIA knows, which has not hesitated to launch one of the best ideas in its RTX 40. in recent years and that will make us see 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 has been working on the Path Traced version of Half-Life 2 using NVIDIA’s RTX Remix? Most likely, you would believe us about this statement, but it would be much more doubtful for many if we talked about the result being, to say the least, spectacular. And it is that the work of Igor Zdrowowicz, which has been 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 last two decades.
Half-Life 2 Key with Path Tracing is RTX Remix
Yesterday NVIDIA released the code for its RTX Remix, and believe us that this is going to 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 take away control over the game’s lighting and now everything depends on ray tracing. And it is that one of the capabilities that Deep Learning allows is to learn what direct lighting is like via rasterization to create an equivalent for Ray Tracing or Path Tracing.
The big difference with respect to the technique used up to now is that the light rays leave the primary light sources and travel through the scene until they disappear or leave the scene. On the other hand, with the Ray Tracing that we had up to now, only the lighting generated indirectly was calculated, which meant that it was not completely accurate. However, there is the problem that applying ray-traced lighting to 100% from the start can lead to completely breaking the art of the games.
Hence, 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 that it does not break its original aesthetics and the mods that are appearing are at least visually spectacular.
The game looks spectacular and we are not exaggerating
For those who say that Ray Tracing does not contribute anything, we leave you a couple of videos apart from the Half-Life 2 image gallery with Path Tracing. It makes us want to take our RTX 40 and start playing the Valve classic again, one of the best games in the history of history.
With this, it is more than “confirmed” that ray tracing is something totally useless that does not contribute anything to games, not even visually. And believe us that it will not be the last one that we will see this impressive thanks to its renewed lighting among the different classic PC games. How about Doom 3 with Path Tracing for example?
