Half-Life 2 RTX Playable Demo Will Be Released In Few Days

NVIDIA has announced that a playable demo of the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 remaster, which features stunning characters and worlds, will be available for download on Steam next week, on March 18. It will be completely free for those who already own the game.

"Half-Life 2 RTX uses the latest version of RTX Remix leveraging new RTX Neural Rendering technologies, cutting-edge full ray tracing, accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex to bring one of the greatest video games of all time to life in a whole new light," the announcement reads.

Thanks to the cutting-edge DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which was released in January this year, the performance has been multiplied by 10.2X on average at 4K, and as proved by the video, the game can run at 265 FPS on the GeForce RTX 5090.

The demo will showcase some key areas in the game, Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt, and GeForce Product Manager Nyle Usmani told Club386 that it will offer around two hours of gameplay. If you'd like to give it a try, you can already wishlist it on Steam to be reminded when it's released. 

Half-Life 2 RTX Remaster was announced in 2023 and has been developed by Orbifold Studios, formed by four teams behind top mods, including Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Raising the Bar: Redux.

Last November, NVIDIA released a tribute video for the original Half-Life 2 and shared a sneak peek at the upcoming reworked game ahead of the 20th anniversary of the title. The full version is still in development, and its release window is yet to be revealed.