Half-life 2 RTX is a complete disappointment

I bought a Valve Index so I could play Half-life: Alyx. At the time, the Index was a $1,000 package and I bought it with the sole intention of playing Alyx. As a Half-life fan, Alyx was absolutely worth it.

I’m not trying to brag. It was a foolish and irresponsible purchase by a developmentally stunted, unburdened manchild. I’m just trying to establish my credibility as an ENORMOUS Half-life fan; the way a developmentally stunted, unburdened manchild might try to do.

And now, as the aforementioned manchild I am, will complain at length about the absurdly bad and disappointing Half-life 2 RTX.

I don’t know why I got excited for this. I was disappointed by Portal RTX a few years ago. The idea that this would be any different/better should have been obviously false to me. And yet, despite my fever for new Portal content at-or-exceeding my fever for new Half-life content, they still got me with that age-old trick of the video game industry: the hypetrain.

Signs of a bad time

So, I’m playing the game on my desktop which is running Ubuntu 24.10 (don’t ask), it’s got a Ryzen 9 5900X, 128 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3080. This is my video editing rig that I’ve been using for the last two (and change) years.

It’s a great machine. I’ve got no issues playing the (few) games I typically play on it. But do note I can count on one hand the number of hours I’ve played games on this machine. This is my work PC and I don’t want to mix business with pleasure.

Before the game launched, it showed the “Processing Vulkan shaders” dialog.

“Hey, that’s fine. That usually happens the first time you run a game on Linux.” I naively thought.

But when the game crashed before getting to the main menu and I had to restart the game… well, it brought up that same dialog.

In fact, it processes Vulkan shaders every single time I start the game.

But that’s only a tiny little baby gripe I have with the game. My next point is sure to be more divisive.

Literally what is the point of raytracing?

Like, I get that some people might prefer the look, but to me? This doesn’t look any better than Half-life: Alyx (and in some ways, the game looks worse).

Pictured: Wow. A soft, blobular shadow that in no way conforms to my expectation of what a shadow from the given light source should look like.

I just realized it may not be entirely obvious what shadow I’m talking about. On the ground just to the left of the gravity gun there’s a dark spot. That shadow is being cast by the legs that are hanging there. Trust me, it doesn’t look any better in motion.

Now, I will admit that the explosions look really nice. But how much does raytracing really add?

And these shadows look alright. But I just don’t think that they are worth it. To put it another way, they’re not good enough to justify the performance penalty you incur in order to generate them.

Not to mention the degraded visuals in other areas that you have to deal with.

There’s supposed to be chain link fencing between the posts in the foreground. But having RTX on makes them exist only as a ghostly afterimage in the hearts and minds of gamers.

Then, there’s the corrupted MPEG-like motion smearing in some areas, the visual artifacting left over from the RT de-noising process, and the grotesque DLSS upscaling that has to be done to make the image even approximate the native resolution of your monitor… and it all starts to seems like a joke.

Plus, add in that sweet (yet subtle) coil whine that my GPU introduces into my left studio monitor when it’s running at its full 340 watt glory, and you’ve got a recipe for the complete, modern-day gaming encumbrance.

But it’s not all Ray’s fault

RTX being the joke that it seems to be, it’d be easy for me to just place the blame on this newfangled technology, shake my fist at the clouds, and retreat into my retro gaming cave.

But the fact is, it’s not all RTX‘s fault. The game is just unstable. Like… unreasonably unstable.

It crashed approximately… checks notes… every single time I got to gameplay.

While the game was in it’s non-native (read: crashed) state, the framerate was bouncing all over the place.

Do also note that I couldn’t get Mangohud to hook into the game to get a clearer picture of the how bad the performance actually was. Maybe this is an instance of PEBKAC, and I’ll accept that criticism. I’ve never claimed to be particularly good at PC or Linux or anything.

But that doesn’t matter, I could just feel the inconsistent frame times and it was making the game unplayable. I’d fire my weapon once and there was a 50/50 chance of having a perceptible delay before the gun actually fired or having it fire on time.

And what about the Steam Deck?

This is an NVIDIA port. Are you kidding?

Realism schmealism

I’m kinda tired of all these games (and even movies and TV shows) that want everything to look more realistic. What if realism sucks?

I know, it violates the modern sensibilities to say this. But when I entered this shack and saw a more “realistic” zombie, it was unsettling. Not in the fun way that the more stylized look of zombies in the original game (or even in Alyx) provide.

Nah. This was like, an almost sympathetic response. Because, ultimately, when we’re talking about “more realistic” zombies, we’re talking about gore.

But even the setting of the game, the more photoreal textures and blah blah blah. I’m not interested in that. It detracts from the original vision of the game in my book.

Conclusion

So with all that said, I’m disappointed in Valve for allowing Nvidia to butcher this game.

But I am, however, satisfied in continuing to label Jensen Huang as one of the worst techgrifters on planet earth.

I’m gonna go back to HL2 Anniversary and play the game at like 800 FPS or something. And I’ll have more fun doing it, too.

~Toodles!