Black Mesa gets shiny: Free Half-Life ray-trace mod adds subtle splendor

Half-Life is a legendary game, a title that was ahead of its time in its storytelling, mechanics, and technology. Graphically, though, it can't help but look extremely 1998. A new, free ray-tracing mod makes the PC original a lot more compelling to revisit.

Sultim Tsyrendashiev, working on GitHub as sultim-t, has worked on graphics upgrades and ports of many games and tools, including the Serious Engine and Quake. The Xash3D: Ray Traced project, now ready for public use with Half-Life 1, tweaks an alternative version of Half-Life's Source engine to add a custom path-traced renderer. The tech that moves applications from fixed to real-time path tracing is interesting and promises even more ray-traced nostalgia kicks to come.

But what most of us are interested in is how it works in Half-Life. It's very pretty, and while the effect is mostly subtle, it can steal the show in big moments (sorry, tentacle giant that needs to go). I played through the first level and a bit into the second one with the mod installed, and I visited a few other levels with map warp cheats (though I quickly died in most since I couldn't get weapon cheats to work). The textures aren't upgraded (unless you do so yourself with other mods), but modern-day lighting can make a big difference in how some of the game's areas look.

My favorite part of this mod is that you can flip back and forth between the classic graphics and the new ray-traced hotness with Alt+X. It's quite helpful if you're wondering why so many games and graphics card makers are excited about the potential of RTX on both new games and remasters.

You'll need a copy of Half-Life installed from Steam to use this mod. Installation consists of unzipping a few folders and transferring their content to the game's local files. If you have an Nvidia card that can support it, an optional DLSS setting can help boost your frame rate while playing with RTX on. The game ran smoothly on an RTX 3070 at 4K, but I didn't play many busy areas. Lowering the resolution certainly isn't a bad idea, given that you're not exactly working with high-res materials in the game.

If this mod makes you a ray-tracing convert or piques your interest in how other classic games might look with a path-traced spit-shine, consider checking out the original Doom, Minecraft RTX, or, back in the Valve-iverse, the free update to Portal. For a more fully upgraded Half-Life (which would be great to combine with this kind of ray tracing), the Black Mesa remake/remaster has you covered.

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