The demo lasts about 2 hours which is perfect to experience a part of Half-Life 2 with full path-traced visuals. It’s also a great way to see if your PC can handle the game—because yes, you'll need a beefy machine to run HL² RTX, as it relies entirely on path-tracing technology.

My rig is a 5900X, RTX 4080, and 32GB of RAM. I get good performance with everything set to ultra in "4K". DLSS on 'Performance' and I can even push it to 'Balanced' without big FPS drops. The developers did an amazing job with the upgraded assets and lighting—it really magnifies the atmosphere of the original game.

That said, there are a few issues: I can’t take Steam screenshots because it crashes the game and sometimes HL² RTX freezes, forcing me to kill the process via Task Manager (fortunately, the developers are aware of both bugs).

The best part is : if you own the original HL², the full mod will be free!