Someone had the delusional idea of setting up a new mod for the first game in the saga Half-Lifejust to see how it runs under a card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 but the results were in the end quite unexpected.
The graphics processing hardware industry has grown by leaps and bounds since this title first hit the market back in November 1988.
A quarter of a century has passed and in the middle of 2023 we can affirm that the most beastly graphics card that exists on the market would be the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.
This baby can be around MXN $45,000 and it represents the best alternative, in terms of processing power, that any PC Gamer can conceive of for the latest generation titles.
The card can run games at 2160p with ray tracing active without appearing to suffer severe bouts of fatigue like AMD’s products in the same segment thanks to its DLSS 3 technology.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 with full specifications can run at 41 FPS, something that may seem low for the most demanding but is admirable for those of us who measure how demanding the title is with resources.
Under such a context anyone would think that then this card could run a game from 25 years ago without problem. But the reality is that there is a legendary title that puts this piece of hardware in serious trouble.
How an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 almost succumbed to Half-Life
Youtube channel sultim_t He has just uploaded a disturbing video to his channel showing a Mod designed especially for the first Half-Life game.
Where, to the surprise of locals and strangers, we find a peculiar renewed version of the game, since some textures and assets remain essentially identical.
But yes, the game runs with some of the last generation improvements including Ray Tracing, producing a curious effect when using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 card:
In the video above we see how the aesthetic proposal of the game is, applying all these lighting effects. But for their part, the madmen of JVTech they decided to run the game on the most powerful graphics card of the moment.
The experiment gave some interesting results, where the title struggled to run at 60 FPS and Ray Tracing pushed the card to the limit.
With this it is verified that this lighting function gives great realism to everything but it is very demanding.