From 90s classics to RTX: How Half-Life and Star Wars graphics have changed in 20 years

After some time, we took a look at two legendary series that have been with us for over 20 years and during that time have produced some revolutionary and very popular installments. The great news is that we are still actively hearing about them today. This time we focused on the Star Wars and Half-Life game series. In both cases, these are commercially very successful and popular games. How have they moved graphically and what is their future?

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Half-Life 2 RTX

Valve’s Half-Life series probably doesn’t need much introduction to gamers. I believe we all know enough about her, but today we will not focus on the great stories, but on the graphics and the future of the series. We will skip the first part and focus directly on the second part, which has been significantly improved and brought the new Source Engine. Released in 2004, it was the first game to offer artificial intelligence that powered NPC characters. As for the graphics, they have changed significantly and even today they don’t look bad at all, although of course you can tell the age.

Enter Orbifold Studios, a team made up mostly of modders and fans of the series. They do not hide their love for Half-Life and decided to use technology Nvidia RTX Remix for making a remaster. Thanks to this, Half-Life 2 will receive ray-tracing support, higher sharpness, better lighting and new textures. Most of the game’s assets are rebuilt from the ground up, and the game offers up to eight times the texture resolution compared to the original. You can see the comparison below. We don’t have a release date for Half-Life 2 RTX yet, but we wouldn’t expect it this year. Finally, it should be noted that this modern project will be playable only with Nvidia RTX graphics cards.

Star Wars

To this day, the Star Wars video game series has offered perhaps dozens of different projects, we will talk about the best ones that eventually led to the modern technology from Nvidia RTX. It all started in 1983, when it was published The Empire Strikes Back on several platforms, but the most successful was on Atari 2600 and Intellivision. In it, players take on a Snowspeeder and fight against giant AT-AT walkers on the planet Hoth.

Another big game that is perhaps even considered the best of the Star Wars world is Knights of the Old Republic from 2003. The game offered a perfect story and gameplay, it is indeed a very successful title that sold more than 3.5 million copies, also proves the fact that the American studio Saber is working on a full-fledged remake.

Two parts were also commercially successful Battlefrontu from Electronic Arts, which offered perfect gameplay, graphics and audio-visual aspects and together managed to sell over 23 million copies, it’s a shame that, like twenty years ago, we didn’t get a third part – maybe once. We must also mention the successful story-driven two-part adventure game Jedi by Respawn. She offered the story of a young Jedi named Cal Kestis, who survived Order 66. At the moment, the third part is also confirmed, it could arrive in 2026 – 2027 at the earliest.

Finally, we have to stop at the last Star Wars game that was released. She’s the one Outlaws from the studio Ubisoft Massive Entertainment, which was the first to use all possible technologies for better graphics. The PC version is improved by NVIDIA RTX Dynamic Illumination (RTXDI), which complements the game’s ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows and ray-traced global lighting, bringing visual effects to the world to the next level.

RTXDI then determines the most important light patterns in Star Wars Outlaws to cast physically accurate shadows with rays. Performance remains fast thanks to the innovative RTXDI design and on the graphics card GeForce RTX 40 series ray tracing is even faster thanks to the fourth generation of super fast Ray Tracing cores in each card. To make the ray tracing effects look their best and the performance to be super fast at the highest resolutions, Star Wars Outlaws is also included NVIDIA DLSS 3.5. Below is a video that summarizes everything – how do you like Outlaws? Let us know.

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