The Half-Life 2 RTX demo is out now and well worth a go… if your graphics card can take it

Screenshots from Half-Life 2 RTX, showing the various new effects delivered by full ray tracing and enhanced assets. — (Image credit: Valve, Orbifold Studios)

Hey, you can finally try out Half-Life 2 RTX. It's been a long ol' wait for this one, the team of modders/developers at Orbifold Studios have spent a good few years on this already, but at least two levels are ready to play right now.

Head over to the Half-Life 2 RTX steam page and it's available to download. Once in, you can play through Ravenholm, and if it's the set-up the same as when I played through it last week, Nova Prospekt will unlock once you're done there.

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Half-Life 2 RTX minimum specs
OS	64-bit Windows 10 / Windows 11
Processor	Intel Core i5 8600, AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Memory	16 GB RAM
Graphics	Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
Storage	50 GB available space

That's not great news if you're on older hardware or an RTX 3060, which reportedly might struggle. You can lower the settings and turn off individual settings on the fly through the RTX Remix menu (Alt + X), however, which might help some.

If you want a better idea of what you're getting yourself into with the new demo, I wrote all about my first playthrough last week. To sum that up, it looks fantastic and there's been careful attention paid to the little details, though, at it's core, it's the same ol' Half-Life 2 we know and love.

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.

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