Something to look forward to: Adding ray tracing to classic games has been a great way to show the difference it makes. Last week, a modder posted a YouTube trailer that shows the feature used on the original Half-Life. The modder plans to make it playable this year, although no specific date has been mentioned.
Sultim_t says in his trailer description for Half-Life: Ray Traced that he will add real-time path tracing to Valve’s first first-person shooter in 1998. Ray-tracing effects include l global illumination, reflections, refractions and soft shadows.
Path tracing is similar to ray tracing, but much more comprehensive and computationally expensive. Ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Resident Evil Village is mixed with traditional rasterization, only handling effects like global illumination or glare. By comparison, path tracing makes the whole scene with ray tracing.
It takes so much power that only games with relatively basic or old graphics like Minecraft or Quake II RTX can use it at playable frame rates. However, even these games need scaling methods like DLSS to do this. Sultim_t doesn’t mention any scaling functionality for Half-Life: Ray Traced.
Sulim_t previously developed a ray tracing mod for Serious Sam, although this mod is based on a previous attempt to add ray tracing to Half-life. Sulim_t plans to Release on GitHub with the source code when completed. In 2019, Nvidia announced plans to bring ray tracing to more classic games, but hasn’t revealed any since.
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