Half-Life with RTX
Half-Life with RTX
Black Mesa appears much improved without ray tracing.
Cool though
It looks good overall. However, using ReShade on most games significantly alters the depth when you enable Adaptive Sharpen, Adaptive Light, HDR, Bloom, and SSAO. I'm still surprised by how much it affects Borderlands 2. Turning it on makes it feel like a completely different game. The game already supports SSAO, but this additional filter greatly changes the depth.
System Shock 2 with RTX would be quite impressive. It offers the perfect ambiance to take full advantage of it at a high level. I can picture how stunning the realistic lighting would appear if it were physically accurate. The way shadows interact with the eerie atmosphere would definitely be a major selling point, making me willing to invest in an RTX card just to relive it. I was hoping for Half-Life:Source to have similar quality, but Valve didn’t try to port it like Black Mesa did.
ReShade seems unlikely because it runs on older hardware (DX6 or DX7 era), though a newer version on GOG might be using a more modern API.
It seems the game was likely developed primarily to highlight the simplicity of moving from Goldsrc to Source instead of creating an entirely new Half-Life experience like in Black Mesa.