Half-Life: A Full RT/Path-Traced Upgrade For The OG PC Classic Tested!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 มิ.ย. 2024
- The maker of ray traced versions of Serious Sam, Doom, and Quake - Sultim Tsyrendashiev - returns with a fully path-traced upgrade to the classic Half-Life, a free mod for owners of the game. So how does it work, and what makes the original game such a suitable candidate for a full RT upgrade? Alex Battaglia gets to grips with the mod.
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:18 How to get the mod
00:02:25 Why Path Tracing works with Half-Life
00:05:08 Direct Lighting
00:07:08 Global Illumination & Emissive Lighting
00:10:33 Added Reflections & Materials
00:14:25 Added Volumetric Lighting & Configurability
00:17:00 Performance and IQ Considerations
00:19:38 Conclusion
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I never thought about how good lightning was in the original and how much it probably meant for the success then and still, interesting.
Yeah, now that I think about it, I think half-life lighting is better than Unreal's.
So, I’m just 20. I played half life around what? 2015? I still remember how dumbfounded I was by comparing the graphics of half life and anything else.
Sure, by that point me and the internet agreed the models looked goofy but somehow playing it, it just didn’t matter.
A lot of that credit goes to John Carmack and Michael Abrash; the reason IdTech based games (and GoldSrc and Source based games, by extension) had such good lighting, is because the radiosity calculations are essentially energy-conserving ray-tracing. Physically-correct energy conservation wasn't a thing that appeared again until later in the 2010s with PBR-based renderers (difference being they were doing their thing live... and generally without ray-traced lighting bounces).
The tradeoff was that to make a map, you had to be content waiting half a day while your .bsp was calculating the shadowmaps with its RAD pass.
Not saying the Half-Life team deserve no credit; it really was masterful use of the tools at hand... but also, the tool at hand was pivotal to the mood of Half-Life and Quake.
@@ghost085 their use of lightning was clever but the HL engine is not even remotely comparable to Unreal.
this overview is stupid af they didnt explain why no video shows 3d acceleration and why the textures are all pixelated is it possible to run with both or what?
This pretty much explains why it was mind blowing back in the day. I couldn't articulate it when I was a teenager when I played it back in 1998 but I knew I was in awe the entire time. I still think the game looks amazing in terms of lighting. I just couldn't imagine it would need Ray Tracing technology to explain it.
wow, you played that game as a teenager? Do you still play video games? I was like 2 when the game dropped hahaha
It's crazy awesome but really shows how great the lighting is for a 25 year old game
yeah or how poorly game development has evolved...seen that Dead Island 2 gameplay footage? I mean...truly what real improvements were there compared to the 10 year old prequel?
@@Decenium imo I would love to see a ton of older games get texture and rt updates or at least updated lightmaps generated with more bounces quicker
@@Decenium Dying Light 2 was another shambles.. half the time when you enable RTX the lighting looks LESS genuine.. not to mention the bullshit that Techland passed off as 'storytelling' but I digress..
I was going to say ' F off has it been 25 years' and then it dawned on me.. Got to love late 90's early 2000s FPSs, but I feel old now :(
Like people who were born when the game launched probably already have kids of their own right now. lol
Props to John Carmack for light.exe, 20 years ahead of its time.
the canned light in the original is artistry, not tech.
@@xBINARYGODx r/confidentlyincorrect
@@xBINARYGODx the energy-conserving radiosity tool (basically a ray tracer, for making the shadows, by turning your PC into a heater for half a day) was literally *the* reason that the artists had tthat tool to use. Lots of other games of the era did not have energy conserving lights, which is why so many games essentially looked like a sci-fi red-light district... the light falloffs weren't even correct, let alone bounces and shadows with penumbras.
I can promise you that the artistry was good because lightbulbs acted light lightbulbs, and if they didn't actually act like lightbulbs, it would not have been worth it to put the effort into making them work that way.
And the people to thank for making lights that acted light lightbulbs are Carmack and Michael Abrash, circa Quake 1 (which was licensed and tweaked to make GoldSrc).
@@theory-in-motion do you have an example for the games that looked like a sci-fi red-light district?
@@xBINARYGODx I'd have like to watch how long it would take those map authors to hand paint every single light source on every single surface, I reckon they might have been just about ready to release the game by now
That green desk lamp should definitely be an emissive surface in green, as it was in the original, and not emit red light only downward. It's one of those very classic green desktop lights you see in every tv show and movie.
Yeah, that's the single bad implementation shown on this video. Makes the scene and the lamp look really off.
Otherwise it looks really nice.
I believe the red is from the bounce off the red wood on the desk. The light itself seems yellow (it is a shame there's no green light tho)
@@DrViili it was probably some hack by the devs which the rendered cant account for automatically
yeah it was bugging me tbh
The solution isn't to change the color of the light, which is correct, but rather, to change the material of the lamp to be a green-enameled milk glass, with transmissive properties... in modern offline renderers, this would be pretty straightforward; in modern games (thinking Portal RTX) I can't think of a single example, but we know how to do it, we essentially know the math behind it, etc... it's essentially subsurface scattering that's sort of similar to Beer's law affecting clouds, with an added index of refraction shift at the end, due to the green clearcoat, if I'm not mistaken. There are some shortcuts here and there, but that's not what a path-tracer is about, necessarily.
The challenge is, like I said, if it were a game model, you might have different materials with different meshes, and that would be doable; when RTX Remix is available, you could even define how that material behaves after the fact, rather than authoring it, yourself.
The problem comes in where that lamp isn't actually a model. It's a .BSP brush, like every other wall in the game. And giving those textures (the white texture and the green texture) the properties that would make them be treated like a candy-coated milk-glass might have really weird consequences for any other wall / etc using those textures... and determining when you specifically have a lamp, and what parts of it are a lamp, might again be difficult, because again, it's not a model, it's a bunch of little walls and pillars in the shape of a lamp, with a light on the inside of it.
I've been playing this the last week and think it's such a fantastic idea. Would love to see Half-Life 2 and the Episodes with the addition of ray-traced lighting - better yet; Deus Ex.
DEUS EX! DEUS EX! DEUS EX!
Half Life 1 gets 26fps on a £1000 3080, a card tier that less than 5% of all PC gamers own, what do you think would be the fps in Half Life 2 - a game some 500% more demanding than the first in terms of hardware?
Deus Ex was the first game that came to mind when Portal with RTX dropped and I am so excited for it to happen now.
@@TheVanillatech yeah you have to use dllss or fsr, i get 60+ fps on my rx6600 with fsr on quality
@@TheVanillatech most of that overhead is just from the raytracing though, half life 2 will barely have any extra performance hit. just because it is newer is irrelevant for a game thats already generations old.
The one thing I never forget about Half Life is their speech synthesizer (sort of).
The "base voice" (ie; "access denied") was fully capable of reading out a lot of text. As a kid I had so much fun just typing random stuff in the console for it to read. I think mods even used it to broadcast stuff in multiplayer games.
Memory is such a funny thing. It's not the way the game really was, but these "rose coloured glasses" mods fit much better with the way I remember Half Life's other-worldly presentation. Back in the day, even that simple vertex-based flashlight was amazing.
This is awesome, cudos to the creators. Other than the zero -roughness material on the revolver that just looks broken to me ( i wish they would use the same values they are using for the crowbar tip, looks way better IMO ) and the somewhat extreme glow of toxic waste / bloom, It's a super cool mod, definitely will play it. Hope we can see something similar for Unreal 1 someday.
The revolver looks like it's an extra dimensional object 🤣
They should make the water in certain areas look dirty and simply changing the colour won't be enough to archive this. Games having clean looking water in areas where it doesn't make sense is done too often. Else it's a great mod, even if I don't have a RT capable card thanks to outrageous pricing.
I would love to see this for HL2 actually, because imo black mesa was already an amazing upgrade for the original half life
Half Life has always been a very special game. This just highlights it!
Another great video Alex 👍👍👍. Digital Foundry leveled up when they added you. Been along time PC player and you explain the PC features and graphics in general better than anyone ever
I prefer the matte surfaces. Super shiny surfaces do exist in the real world, but are not very common in most buildings. This is one reason I don't like many ray tracing implementations. Too much shiny and not enough diffusion.
One hundred percent agree! Some of the parts of Portal RTX look very strange because there is too much shiny and it breaks with the original art style.
I thought the same. But then I looked at things in the real world and realized there are actually plenty of shiny surfaces all around us! We just aren't used to seeing them in games.
@@MegaKiri11 Depends on the material!
The thing I tend to find missing is that in most construction surfaces are somewhere in the 60-90% roughness range - very high matte surfaces like paper or unfinished wood are far more rare than very reflective surfaces.
Of course, this is because it's really expensive - mirror reflections are barely a cost, just bounce the incoming ray and keep going. Diffuse reflection needs a lot more fancy techniques and horsepower.
@@SimonBuchanNz Yes very good point!
Goes to show how much more important lighting is when it comes to creating a sense of whether something is realistic or not. If we were to see no or bad shadows IRL, our brain would be firing off warning signals telling us something is off. Like when visiting the equator when the sun is completely perpendicular to the ground
The thing I love about these path traced retro games is that it has that '90's representation of fake videogame's being shown in movies/tv' if that makes sense, sort of like the Californication music video. I love that aesthetic.
Another that comes to mind is the Resident Evil 2 & 3/ Tekken etc cgi intros. I'd love to play a game in that style.
Finally someone as cultured as myself who can see beauty in that CG style! I too would love to see a game rendered in that spesific style. Another great example is Tomb Raider 1-2 CGI.
Californication’s music video is embedded in my memory for that exact reason, it was something I always wanted to play!
@@FifthOfNovember_Original Those Tomb Raider cutscenes are awesome, just refreshed my memory.
The closest I've got to this style in actual gameplay would be Perfect Dark Zero I think. I love the look of that game.
@@FifthOfNovember_Original fully ray traced ReBoot game. I've dreamt of it for years.
If you can legally procure your own Mario 64 ROM, to send it through the reverse engineering process, I believe that there's a community project called "Render '96" whose goal it was to replace the textures / models in the game with models / materials that looked like the SGI renders in the magazine ads / instruction booklets, et cetera.
I'm not sure how it's progressing, because there were definitely some copyright concerns getting the original full-rez textures from the same asset-packs that Nintendo originally sourced their textures from... but if they're still going and those issues are being skirted, that's probably the absolute pinnacle of what you're talking about, short of some Killer Instinct backport that would render the 3D models, instead of the 2D sprites.
this is a very detailed review and it helped me to understand how devs cared even the little details.
Sultim is just a one man army, what a hero.
Sultim is a legend at this point. A lot of my playtime these last few years has revolved around his work. I love it.
I know this video is intended to be a highlight of the RTX version, and it's really cool, but for me it only remindsme of how godly the attention to detail was in HL1 and the leap it meant in videogame graphics back in late 90s.
Yeah this video was exquisite because not only is the conversion great and tasteful, but examining what the mod does highlights how good Valve’s work was in the original. Also people have no appreciation for baked/traditional lighting because they fetishize RT and anything “new.”
8:53 really show the limit of this kind of work.
It's a desk lamp, it should not be aggressively lighting the desk, but something much more like what was intended to reproduce in the original game.
That green part (don't have the correct vocabulary for it) covering the lamp isn't light proof, some should be leaking, that's why it's glowing in the classic lighting.
While all this mod does is mostly what I had in mind in case of a RT remix of an old game, there are some details here and here that feels off to me.
Also, my RX 6700 curiously ran it a bit too well to my liking but the temperature it reached while doing that, wasn't.
I think that’s one of the limitations of not using full PBR materials - the lamp shade should be a partially translucent material that scatters light throughout the scene, with it completely opaque it makes the room unrealistically dark. I suppose a hacky solution would be to make the material slightly emissive but I guess if you have to start resorting to hacky lighting tricks then that sort of defeats the purpose of RT rendering in the first place.
@@theblah12 Translucent, that's the word I was looking for.
Anyway, a hacky solution could be the trick needed.
But I don't see it as defeating the purpose of RT rendering.
RT rendering in this very case helps having better accuracy in Half-Life environnement.
With this reasoning in mind, I think that readjusting "by hand" some elements and situation is necessary when the main objective is to keep the vanilla feel.
Or I thought it was, but writing that made me think a bit more.
How can I phrase that..
Okay, what I think of a project like HL RT, is something like this : the crossroad between old technics and modern technology.
When hearing hardware ray tracing, one would think simply as real-time rendering of lightning, shadows, reflection and stuff. So in a modern rendering engine, it would do most of the work if implemented as such.
But, if we were to scratch past the surface/idea, we could see something else.
And in an old game, with old technics, old technologies, what would happens if someone uses RT to reproduce that ?
If this someone bent RT rendering to uses another rule on lighting logic ?
Not accuracy based on reality, but accuracy on the original art direction of that very game ?
This is were, I think, a project like Half-Life RT could aim to something else.
It could close some gaps on Goldsrc rendering for example.
Sometimes, it's on small details that it can make a difference.
It's still fascinating to see, but the more I see these remixes with RT, the more I think they're going the wrong direction.
Beautiful upgrade! I'll definitely have to try it. Awesome video as always Alex - danke schon Mr. Badger Hunter
This is incredible, same goes for others that have previously been released. I was a big fan of replaying Quake RTX. I'll probably give this a look too.
Personally, I'd like to see newer, yet older titles, such as say Splinter Cell, especially Chaos Theory, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, ect, get this kind of treatment. Games where lights and shadow, play a huge role in the gameplay. I have no idea if it's possible, or where someone would even begin, but maybe via RTX Reshade, or something along those lines.
Thanks for an excellent video as always Alex!
omg yes yes yes seeing those games with RT would be amazing
Definitely, it's such a nice way to bring these older titles back to life in a way. A while ago I saw a path tracing mod for the GTA 3, VC, SA games and man it looked so nice while respecting the original art style of the game. So much better than that remaster crap that came out.
Yeah, the first game I thought of when the 20xx series had their raytracing show-off at the announcement was Thief 1 and 2. But Chaos Theory would also be amazing.
There's also Nvidia Remix coming soon(ish?)
@@Vladimir_Kv That's what its called. I couldn't remember the name of it. It acts like a reshade-esque program.
13:06 The modders got to understand that not all metals are polished and giving off a mirror finish. They might want to consider a more realistic approach to what a weapon with a copper tubing would actually look like in a practical sense. For example, an air conditioner bare copper tubing that runs from the compressor, it's never shiny when it's showing its age. Oxidation would definitely have occurred giving a more matte and tarnish finish to it.
This looks ike really solid work! I would pick this over the Black Mesa version for my next playtrough! Great video Alex!
Black Mesa is still great tho so don't miss out on it.
I would slap raytracing on Black Mesa
@@hotdogcandy Not as good as the original.
@@hotdogcandy Oh yeah, don't get me wrong! It pretty great stuff for sure! But there's something with the OG that just takes me back! Also the HECU chatter in Half-Life is so much more menacing vs Black Mesa, never quite got under my skin the same way there.
@@lemonov3031 BM's Xen slaps the original.
Great video as per usual. Amazing mod, well done, with heart, amazing details.
6:01 The desk lamp here looks as bright as something you would see on a film set! The amazing technology of Black Mesa at work?
This still has a long way to go to mimic a lot of the more subtle lighting in the original, especially with lamps. The green desk lamp shown about half way through the video is meant to look like green frosted glass, casting a diffuse glow on the walls and ceiling around it. My graphics card is only a 1070 so I can't play around with any real-time RT, but is subsurface scattering possible in games? That would improve things a lot further.
SSS is possible, yes.
Thanks for the in-depth analysis Alex!
I played for an hour yesterday with the CTR filter on and it was a great experience, I really like how it ties the modern lighting with the retro textures together
It's cool how well the RT lighting aligns with the original lighting.
It makes sense, the original game actually uses ray tracing to bake its lighting in the hammer level editor. You would have to wait like 10-15 minutes for the ray tracing to finish lighting the level, then it would be baked in.
It's a really cool path traced upgrade. The only two critiques I have for it is that in some scenes, the light bouncing feels almost a bit too prominent, and many of the outdoor scenes look like a nuclear bomb is going off because the exposure and volumetric fog is cranked up to 11. It's rather overbearing. It's nice that we can tweak all of that with the console, but it would have been cool if they streamlined that process for people who aren't familiar with console commands and stuff.
Now this is how you do it correctly!
Though, I'd like to see some redrawn textures in higher resolution, but they have to be completely loyal to the original design. This can make it or break it if not done correctly..
Btw, The super chrome materials don't look too good... They lack a bit of roughness and that's it. Even the original materials didn't try to simulate perfect mirrors.
This is amazing, it makes me want to play the game again. Thanks for the video!
Oh thanks for the DLSS dll tip - I noticed how bad the ghosting was before and this fixed me right up!
It looks good, but i think the intensity at times and resulting bloom messes with the artstyle. Stuff like sunlight looks great in RTX, but then stuff like blown out lighting on the microwave and sunrays through windows veer too far from the original’s softer and subtler uses of lighting.
Yeah, it definitely have some awesome features, but i wish they would dial down the bloom & emissive intensity. Playing more than 15 minutes around that green toxic waste would hurt my eyes.
yeah some good technical feats here but it is a mess visually and a bad attempt to maintain the original art style. Hard pass for me.
I want this for Black Mesa !!!!! A full path traced version of the remake would be amazing ! (and vr mod on top would be cherry on the cake)
First DF video to appear on my feed in about a year
It's nice alex gets to make a video for a game he really enjoys 😉
Yay! I was hoping it will make its way here. Had a lot of fun testing this mod, in some spots it's really impressive.
As if I needed an excuse to play Half-Life yet again... wow, this looks amazing! I can't wait to see it for myself!
Awesome video! Amazing how ray tracing is blowing new life into retro games
This is an actual reason for me to use RT for a game, just bringing a classic from being severly outdated in terms of graphical fidelity to being eye candy.
add in some updated texture mods. Half-Life Remastered
Except it's not SEVERELY outdated as HL1 was AHEAD of its time - did you watch the video? A lot of the baked lighting techniques they used in the OG still hold up artistically / fidelity-wise.. just not in real-time.
I really want other game, devs to do this ...
@@phattjohnson it is still severely outdated.
Every reason is a reason to use RT in EVERY game. It makes every game look 100x better.
Sultim is really doing god’s work. I can’t express how much I appreciate this. I played through the whole game again this week for the first time since 1998.
That's a lifetime ago for me 💀
Its a shame not to play this gem every few years. What the hell have you been doing these last 25 years man
Honestly, I didnt play through the whole game when I played in 1998. I got to Xen and never finished it. This is the first time I have even seen the ending of Half-Life. At the time I think unreal came out and I got interested in the unreal engine. I wasn’t super into the game but the new engine looked amazing and the game came with the editor.
@@mstewart248 Didnt even finish it? Oh my. But to be fair when unreal came out it was a tech revolution
It blew me away just how amazing it is!
Now imagine a fully ray traced render engine in Black Mesa.. Although the og one is already pretty heavy for whatever reason)
But even more important a fully ray traced HL2.. That would have been amazing!
It will only take them another 20 years to do....
if only
"Although the og one is already pretty heavy for whatever reason"
Because Black Mesa despite not being a RT game, uses some modern and still relatively heavy rasterization tech.
Just because we have Raytracing in modern GPU's that doesn't mean they are all monster rasterization machines.
Also modern rasterization tech, can be as heavy to Raytracing itself, why, because some raster effects, can use raytracing in their calculations, afaik Steep parallax mapping is one of those.
Btw I'm not saying BM uses Steep parallax mapping or any particular raster effect using raytracing but none the less, its lightmapping system, is way more advanced than the one used in HL1 and in some ways, above the one used in original HL2.
"Not all lightmapping is born equal" :) Unlike HL1 lightmaps that are low rez and just a mix of two simple diffuse textures, slapped in mostly flat surfaces, Black Mesa ones, are high res, a more complex multi-material system with many layers, supporting directional normal mapping, specular lighting and advanced per-pixel shaders, plus of course, the world geometry, is way more complex than HL1 (a single BM scene can be way more complex than a entire HL 1 level...) and even HL 2, GPU's still need to rasterize all those triangles...
And unlike HL 1 that used disconnected from the world and very simplistic lighting to light dynamic objects, BM just like HL2 before it, uses volumetric light probes, to give dynamic objects moving through the world, a more realistic and integrated lighting, that data still needs to be retrieved in real time.
And lastly and perhaps the more important reason, for the heavier performance of Black Mesa compared to past Source games, it makes more use of the dynamic per pixel lighting and projected real time shadow maps, introduced in Portal 2, plus volumetric rays (also called God Rays) and other stuff I may be forgetting.
Hope this gives you some idea why BM may still be heavy in modern PC's, specially low end ones, despite using "lightmapping".
@@Argoon1981 I'm pretty sure BM don't have real volumetric godrays, just the screen space ones. Yeah, I know that real time lighting even the rasterized is pretty hravy, but lightmaps are precalculated and not performance heavy because of that, just for the VRAM, as far as I know.
But I think that the main issue of the performance is the old API and inefficient usage of hardware, especially CPU cores.
Black Mesa devs have completely abandoned the project. There's a bug that prevents controller support that they refuse to fix. I think they have a lot of spaghetti code and technical debt.
I think it's better that people maybe start from scratch with RT and upscaled textures on the original Half Life for an HD legacy project than try to mod Black Mesa.
thats just awesome i remember playing this as a teen in the 90s and i was just in awe of what i saw on the screen, it was so so ahead of its time back then.
Oh god please someone make a RT mod for Thief already.
Wow damn, I already knew the original's lighting was really good for its time, just not dynamic and lightmaps were very low res, but the new renderer still levels it up so much, now just gotta use 4K textures faithful to the original ones.
The volumetric effects look stellar!
This game was my first introduction to FPS. Fell in love with this game immediately. And then HL2 was released, my brain exploded.
Replayed with RTX but I was using the dll 3.1 and not the one Alex suggested.
The only thing I found odd about this mod is that some spot lights, or moving lights don't actually act as light sources. My guess is there was some technical issue and it was too hard to figure out so it was just disabled.
Yeah, I found the lighting to be far less dynamic than quake 1 path traced.
If I remember correctly, most spotlights in half life were done by using the transparent geometry method seen in 2:25, since they are just meshes they probably can't be converted to a light source without modifying each individual entity for every single map
Its an artistic decision. They do cast light but it's not very bright. I can't explain the transparent geometry "fog" though.
i can only imagine the potential of Black Mesa would be with ray tracing.
I think this is the first Ray Tracing mod I've seen that doesn't look completely jarring and doesn't ruin the original game's art style for the most part. So i might give Raytracing a chance finally with this one.
Nice. Hope the performance is good.
I'm a simple being: I see a new Digital Foundry video, I click 'Like'.
so tired of this meme
Would love to see path tracing in the Black Mesa remake
Amazing video
Yep… I’m kill counting this for sure. Outstanding!!!
I'd like to see a mod like this for HL2.
The game's absolutely fantastic, I only recently bought it on Steam and started playing it recently. I love the visuals of these FPS games from the early 2000s like Doom 3, HL2 and Butcher Bay. RT would add so much to them.
I think its being worked on
Working out your soulders would also add much to you.
This looks gorgeous. The emissive lighting is a bit strong, and very hard on the eyes, but overall, this is great. Not sure what I'd prefer to replay now; the ray-traced mod for the original, or the Black Mesa remake.
Thank you DF !
Xash is based on GoldSrc source, its technically a reverse engineered Updated version of HL Engine.. it does take spin on its own for majority of what it does.
Edit: the FWGS are Community Fork and Port for Cross-Platform (Aiming to run Counter-Strike/HL-Based on Android/iOS), the Sultim version is Fork of this Fork
it's very cool, that said imo some of the areas look more correct / better with the original lightmaps than with the ray tracing more of a personal preference thing but the freezer room and the ladder up to open sky and a few other areas look better, the ray traced lighting in some cases seems overly bright to the detriment of the environment.
This. Some sources are too bright and it just looks wrong. This is nice but clearly who did it isn't a professional artist so there's quirks in many spots.
I do love this but I also want a HL Ray tracing mod that does make all of the metal objects reflective even if it isn't faithful to the source material. I just wanna see it 😂
These videos from Alex are always a delight for us fellow RT nerds 🙌
This is very cool :o imagine if raytracing was added to the black mesa mod!
My 6950XT runs it quite well at 1440p. FSR quality helps ensure high frame rates.
What frame rates are you getting?
@@stuartedwards6996 I picked up playing at the beginning of Questionable Ethics, as that's where I was on my latest playthrough. At 1440p and No FSR and everything turned on, I got about 40 fps, though it swung around quite a bit higher and lower. Turning on FSR to Quality put me solidly above 60. Without measuring exactly I'd estimate 70fps average. Out doors it jumped quite a bit higher. Maybe 90. Putting FSR to balanced saw over 100fps, and surprisingly I couldn't really see the difference in image quality. Normally I wouldn't game with FSR set that low, but in this case I'd happily do it for 100+ fps.
@@Aremisalive Great, thank you for the detailed answer, very informative. I have a 6800XT and a 1440p monitor so was just trying to estimate my performance. I guess the FSR balanced is because the older graphics assets and textures are not high enough quality to really show up any issues. Good to know though as I usually try to stay away from upscaling and probably would not have tried balanced.
Did this game not have bilinear texture filtering? Or is this a stylistic choice for this comparison?
Bilinear filtering wasn't common on the PC until the DX8 era.
@@richardhunter9779 Hmm. I guess. Unreal Tournament (which definitely had BF on Glide, OpenGL, and Direct3D) was out in late '99, I would have assumed a '98 game would have had it.
It did have bilinear filtering if you used opengl or directx but software mode didn't have a filter. Personally, I think the lack of filter helps the texture and gives the impression of higher detail. Enabling filtering makes everything an uniform blurry blob because the texture resolution is so low.
@@jorge69696 Yah I guess they were pretty low res. UT had decent textures plus on Glide (I had a Voodoo5 5500 AGP) you could enable "detailed textures," a kind of mip-mapped sub-detail that faded in when you got close to objects.
So I guess it is a stylistic choice either for this vid or maybe for the raytraced mod in general.
I love the big and bold chapter text here. Reminded me of Control and Captain America: Civil War.
A link to the github would have been nice
Path traced Half-Life... This is incredible for an initial release! These options are only going to get better with time. What a interesting time for gaming.
System Shock 2 drew me in recently for a new playthrough with it's upgraded textures available; looks great at 1440! It's great to see these classic games get improved for an enjoyable playthrough today.
Pretty awesome stuff. I was eighteen when it first came out. It was an amazing gaming experience then. And it still is today. Even without the Ray-tracing it's a must play. Now it just looks even more gorgeous.
I don't know man. While majority of the scenes look amazing with the ray traced lighting, other aspects seem to be messing with my brain as they stick out a little too sharply compared to the rest of the scene. In particular is the shiny metal surfaces on the gun and the helmet that just feels like there is some rendering error as opposed to feeling like a natural part of the game's graphical design. Its almost like the magnum is made out of see through glass (despite it being reflections) or is invisible. It doesn't help that the reflections also seem to be much sharper than anything else in the scene which makes it stick out more rather than naturally blending with the scene in a realistic way. I mean it looks cool but I also feel like it doesn't really belong there. Weird.
I have the same issue with the water - it looks so out of place
@@totalermist Yeah I forgot to mention the water. It sort of reminds me of those lego games where everything is made up of lego but the trees and foliage are not.
Who would have thought simply adding Ray traced Shadows and Lighting at the right place on the right locations could make all the differences comparing to the Original.
Here's hoping games like Deus EX gets similar treatment.
That would be fantastic!
Well, there is someone making it an unreal Engine one to unreal Engine 5 w😊rapper called DXU 24, and it's looking pretty amazing
It's cool how the spartan low polygon environments of the original Half Life really demonstrate just how much real time lighting can do to make the world appear more convincing
14:08 That little crab is so cute.
Why isn't there texture filtering
I can only imagine how a mod like this would be for the original halo
8:55 I guess whoever redid the lighting for this lamp didn't recognise that it is one of those translucent green banker's lamps
This looks great!
Odd how that lamp shade @9:03 is worse than the original in that it was turned into a solid, non-transmissive object.
Yea, looks like objects which were translucent only during lightmapping are kept opaque. To be fair such selective property was hack
From an artistic perspective, I don't like how a lot of it looks compared to original.
Color of lights seems over exaggerated.
Glad to see your back Alex! I hope you had a speedy recovery!
Why are you so glad to look at a guy's back?
I'm so glad this scales really well for lower end RT GPUs. I have a 2070, and another system with a 3050 (which I likely won't even bother with outside of maybe a test to see if it'll play ok) so I'm glad it seems to play great on a system like mine.
They need to make it so all shiny objects don't look like they have been perfectly polished. It ironically looks less realistic to me.
Bad materials cause this.
Yeah the revolver in particular looks horrible.
I don't care how much polish you use, that revolver is way too reflective. Like it's built out of pieces of mirror.
true
Fantastic. Smashed out the Park again
Still a great game. One of the most impactful on the medium. Great job Alex 👍
the low poly models and low resolution combined with the modern Raytracing really result in an interesting visual style! didn't expect it to work so well
honestly I would like to see more games this way.
Bruuh it looks like crap. At the very least they could have used some A.I. texture uspcalling.
Good comment. I think this might become a more modern version of pixel art, where the old style is preferred for its aesthetics. We do know from lots of tests of human visual processing that it's far more sensitive to differences in light than with colour/shapes, it's why lighting and shadows are so fundamentally important, they convey intensity and depth. The additional fidelity in models and textures generally we care less about, because human visual processing is very iconic, you brain very rapidly turns a low polygon character model into the abstraction of "Barny the security guard" and for the purpose of storytelling that's all you need. Much like southpark can have low detail characters and it still works as entertainment just fine. Same goes for textures, unless that texture has some important information (like words on a chalkboard) it tends to be blurred out in your vision anyways, your brain just thinks "brick wall" it doesn't need to inspect each individual pixel on a brick because the info is far less important.
Yes i was just thinking it looks like a modern pixel art game with modern lighting.
@@Thorny_Fox ehh no. if you want a remake version play black mesa. I want to keep the low poly graphics but with modern lighting giving it a unique flair
It's mind-blowing what a lighting overhaul can do to a game. Even though the assets are from the 90's it now looks like a 2010 game.
Uhhh, no, it definitely doesn't look anything like a 2010 game. You need to check your eyes.
@@The_Ostrich*Then we shall mod it until it does.*
@@The_Ostrich yeah it looks like a 2003 game 😂
It just lacks tessellation
@@ronaldodelacruz6793 Half Life 2 still blows this out of the water and it's from 2004, saying that it's from 2003 is still an insult to 2003.
Very interesting!
Was getting low FPS at first, but after trying out the DLSS 2.5.2 it's so much better. So yea thanks Alex!
It looks nice but a few scenes are too over exposed.
This mod looks great, but at times, the color is so dramatically different that I don't know what to really say. This doesn't look better, but different.
I ran it on GTX1660Ti on a laptop, Got playable 40fps framrate with FSR performance in 1080p and really enjoyed the experience
14:07 Hahahah, the wave like water ripple on those puddles, oof. I wish they had a stiller material/texture to work with for those.
It's a shame all the people who made this are long gone now. They'd have been amazed what the new generation has been able to do with such a primitive game.
This is probably one of the most underwhelming looking path traced games for me.