Something to look forward to: Nvidia has spent years showcasing how its ray tracing technology can enhance classic games like Quake 2 and Portal. As development continues on a fan-made Half-Life 2 remaster, the company has released a free demo along with its ray-traced modding toolkit to highlight DLSS 4 and other new features.

Nvidia’s complete RTX Remix modding suite is now available through the Nvidia app and website. To demonstrate the technology, a free demo of the upcoming fully path-traced version of Half-Life 2 will launch on March 18.

Nvidia’s RTX Remix allows modders to add ray tracing, DLSS, new art assets, and other advanced features to PC games that utilize DirectX 8 and 9. The GPU giant previously used the toolset to create an ambitious remaster of Portal. Meanwhile, independent tinkerers have used early versions of the company’s code on early 2000s classics like Max Payne, Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, SWAT 4, and Need for Speed Underground 2.

A drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for users to add physical properties to old textures so they respond to new ray-traced lighting correctly. Modders can also create new textures or use machine learning to upscale the originals. The tool replaces a game’s original renderer with Vulkan to facilitate the insertion of new assets in real-time.

The full release adds new features to simplify modding and showcase Nvidia’s latest neural rendering techniques. The transformer ray reconstruction model for DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation are key highlights, but the Half-Life 2 RTX demo will also introduce additional tools.

Previous versions of RTX Remix enabled replacing textures and lights, but modders can now swap upgraded character models and quickly match them to their original animations. For example, characters in Half-Life 2 RTX will feature 30 times as many polygons as the original.

A new tool called RTX Skin combines ray tracing and subsurface scattering, allowing ray-traced light to penetrate semi-transparent materials like skin, wax, marble, or jade. Neural Radiance Cache trains a neural network on gameplay content to enhance indirect lighting detail while improving performance by up to 15 percent. The new RTX IO feature dynamically manages texture settings to maintain maximum texture detail without exceeding the GPU’s VRAM limit. Additionally, RTX volumetrics uses ray tracing to enhance fog and god rays more efficiently than traditional rasterization.

Clearly, Nvidia has packed a lot of power into this toolkit. The Half-Life 2 RTX demo should thoroughly showcase RTX Remix’s abilities in the Ravenholm and Nova Prospect chapters. The completed HL2 conversion still needs work and has no launch date yet. However, it will be free to Half-Life 2 owners upon its eventual release.