To me, it's a perfect demonstration of the horrors of "graphics" and the stumbling march of technological process towards "photorealism" which cares not one jot for aesthetics. I have an almost visceral dislike of Nvidia's Quake 2 RTX tech demo showcase doodad. Too many are too damn shiny, they often don't look themselves, and many don't even look good. I find most attempts to add raytracing to old games ugly. The plan is to release this sometime in 2022 on GitHub. "With the hardware accelerated ray tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates," Tsyrendashiev says. Complicated chain of development history, but simply: it's Half-Life with raytracing. "This project is a reengineered version of, which is ANOTHER port of HL1 to ray tracing," Tsyrendashiev explains. Half-Life: Ray Traced is made by Sultim "sultim_t" Tsyrendashiev, building on work by others. See for yourself in the new video, below.
This year, a new Half-Life mod will add raytracing support to Valve's seminal shooter, and even as someone usually perfectly happy with old games looking old, I think it doesn't look half-bad. Raytracing has been a hot high-end graphics trend for a few years, with new games boasting support for the complex lighting simulators and old games being retrofitted with shine. These days, you can't shake a stick without bouncing brown beams around the room.