“Not content with draining Earth’s oceans, they’ve taken the clouds too”
A less-than-100%-successful attempt to marry HALF-LIFE 2 with RTX Remix
THE REAL FUN BEGINS ONCE I GET OUTSIDE. THERE’S NO SKY
While avoiding doing any actual work one day, I stumbled upon something magnificently fiddly and nerdy that can work to improve the way older games look—as long as you have the right hardware. Nvidia has released a beta version of its RTX Remix tech, which uses the RT and Tensor cores in your GeForce RTX graphics cards (sorry, everyone else) to intercept the graphics pipeline of compatible games, upscale the textures and inject ray-traced lighting.
At least, that’s the idea. You can find a list of working titles in places like Reddit and ModDB, and I was looking through it when one name caught my eye: Splinter Cell. Oh hell yeah. This game, released in 2002 when the GeForce 4 was all the rage, was notable for putting graphics cards through their paces.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. This is a beta version of the Remix app, after all. The game sort of launches but throws an error that’s hidden behind a fixed black rectangle so I can’t read it, let alone interact. Out comes Task Manager.
It’s worth noting that RTX Remix isn’t something you can just switch on, it’s an involved process that takes a lot of work, which I’m not doing, so the results won’t be good.
I do manage to get Half-Life 2 running with the Remix runtime, however, and suddenly a game that takes up 3.8GB on my SSD is filling slightly more than that in my graphics RAM.
ZERO POINT
Does it make a difference? Well the floor in the train station that begins the game has some reflections on it that I’m sure weren’t visible before I started tinkering.
Still, the real fun begins once I get outside. There’s no sky. I load various saves to try other levels, but Water Hazard and Follow Freeman are suffering from this insidious
Combine trick. Not content with draining Earth’s oceans, they’ve taken the clouds, probably the ozone layer too. The same is true of the water and even the pupils of NPCs’ eyes, so it’s probably a bug. I’ve left the settings on Ultra and Auto as much as possible, so some fiddling with the developer console might bring them back. Elsewhere, dark areas in the game are very dark, filling the tunnel sections with jumpscares as zombies appear from the gloom, and the
Pause interface doesn’t appear when you press Esc.
There’s a full HL2 RTX Remix project in the works from Orbifold Studios, so we’re probably better off waiting for that.