Nvidia's new ray-tracing tech has me excited to play one of my favourite old games again

When it comes to ranking your favourite ever games, most gamers will actually find a supposedly straightforward task pretty complicated. Recency bias is a real issue, as is nostalgia – it can be hard to remember games for what they actually were, especially when you played them as a younger person.

So, when I sat in on a briefing with Nvidia ahead of this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) to see how its various RTX features have been coming along, suffice to say that one of its demos blew me away. I must have replayed Half-Life 2 a dozen times, but the more time passes, the more its age starts to show visually – which makes its Nvidia-endorsed RTX remake project a real boon.

We've been able to see bits of Half-Life 2 RTX for over a year now, but Nvidia is making some big announcements in relation to it at the conference. For one thing, there's a public demo coming for the first time – on 18 March, the mod will release a two-hour slice of the original game for people to actually play (provided they own the original on Steam). It'll be comprised of two sections – the famous journey through the zombie-infested town of Ravenholme, and a later series of fights in Nova Prospekt.

This whole project is community-led, but it's clear that Nvidia has worked with the team to some extent, as a quid-pro-quo for becoming part of its marketing for 'RTX Remix', its remastering software. The bigger news for Nvidia itself at this GDC is that Remix is getting a proper public release, stepping it forward a few software versions and coming out of early access.

Half-Life 2 RTX | Demo with Full Ray Tracing and DLSS 4 Announce - YouTube

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That's pretty massive for community remasters like this one, which can now take older games and see how much Remix can automate upscales and upgrades to old textures and models. We got to see how Remix has improved over time, as Nvidia has refined it, and the steps forward are significant, letting the program deal with even complex models like the headcrab-infested zombies of Half-Life 2.

The mod isn't just adding ray-traced light, after all. It's also using Remix to update models and surface textures to properly interact with those light sources, and to ensure that everything looks just right.

It's a super impressive suite of options, and Nvidia was at pains to point out that even in its beta run, modders have been showing that Remix can seemingly do more than was even expected internally. Nvidia believed it would perform strongly on games running DirectX 8 and 9, for instance, but has already seen evidence that modders can make older game engines play nicely with Remix, too.

That means there could be any number of games from the early 2000s which could be run through Remix if there's a community keen to take the time to do so. I don't need to wait, though – Half-Life 2 is absolutely in my pantheon of all-timers, both because I was a teenager when I played it first, and because it still holds up as an impeccably paced and inventive shooter.

I'll be smashing through that two-hour demo of the RTX mod when it comes out next week, doubtless marvelling at the realistic shadows and lighting. How long it takes the modding team to finish off the rest of a sizeable game is anyone's guess, but I'm hopeful that one day soon we'll be able to play through it in its entirety with RTX bells and whistles.