Half-Life Looks Gorgeous With Ray Tracing; You Can Test it Now
You can now download the Half-Life 1: Ray Traced project. True to its title, it's a modification that enhances the first Half-Life with ray tracing.
The first version of Half-Life 1: Ray Traced, a modification that adds ray tracing to the first installment of Valve's classic FPS series.
The project looks impressive. You can waych how an oldie like HL looks with dynamic lighting below.
By default, the mod runs without texture filtering. Their pixelated versions look better in my opinion, but if you don't like them, you can change it in the menu.
Half-Life 1: Ray Traced is the latest example of the recently popular trend of adding ray tracing to old games. It's an effective method of visibly enhancing graphics and also relatively easy to achieve, so it's no surprise that there are quite a few such projects. Just to mention Quake 2 RTX or Portal RTX.
Ray tracing is a very demanding technology, so its addition to old games is all the more beneficial, as the end result usually works well not only on the most powerful PCs. Of course, there are exceptions to this, such as RTX Portal, the performance of which leaves a lot to be desired, but in this case the visuals have been thoroughly improved, rather than just adding reflections to old models and textures.
