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Half-Life 2 RTX and all of its foggy, ray-traced lighting is getting a demo next week
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Ray tracing is cool but the screenshots in the video just destroy the atmosphere by making everything day bright.
Yeah it's technically better (crisper, higher res, etc) but the visual language is totally different and IMO worse. That fire just doesn't look as hot, for example.
Lighting as an art form is highly coupled with the given tech. Something as small as just changing the shadow method can require artists relighting a whole game. My guess is they aren't doing this or maybe are pushing the stark lighting the same way depth of field, colored lights, lens flares etc got juiced in previous generations.
That's always wrong. The tech should service the art, not the other way around.
Agreed. In the video a lot of the “RTX Off” scenes look better IMO.
I feel this way about a lot of RTX implementations.