Enlarge / Buying one of these Nvidia cards is a big commitment, both in dollars and case space. Most people who buy them do turn on DLSS and ray tracing, according to Nvidia. So ... what's going on with the folks who don't? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As part of its push for the RTX 4070 , Nvidia's new $600 entry point into its Ada Lovelace GPU series, Nvidia has some statistics that, depending on how you look at them, are either completely baffling or entirely believable.

In a blog post and in press materials sent out before the 4070's debut, Nvidia offers stats pulled from "millions of RTX gamers who played RTX capable games" in February 2023. They show that:

• 83 percent of 40 series gamers "turn RT on" (ray tracing)
• 56 percent of 30 series
• 43 percent of 20 series

As for DLSS, Nvidia's AI-accelerated upscaling and frame-generation tool for games that support it, Nvidia writes that 79 percent of 40 series, 71 percent of 30 series, and 68 percent of 20 series owners turned the feature on.

Enlarge / The familiar hallways of Black Mesa can be made new with some generative lighting. (credit: Valve)

Half-Life is a legendary game, a title that was ahead of its time in its storytelling, mechanics, and technology. Graphically, though, it can't help but look extremely 1998. A new, free ray-tracing mod makes the PC original a lot more compelling to revisit.

Sultim Tsyrendashiev, working on GitHub as sultim-t, has worked on graphics upgrades and ports of many games and tools, including the Serious Engine and Quake. The Xash3D: Ray Traced project, now ready for public use with Half-Life 1 , tweaks an alternative version of Half-Life 's Source engine to add a custom path-traced renderer. The tech that moves applications from fixed to real-time path tracing is interesting and promises even more ray-traced nostalgia kicks to come.

But what most of us are interested in is how it works in Half-Life . It's very pretty, and while the effect is mostly subtle, it can steal the show in big moments (sorry, tentacle giant that needs to go). I played through the first level and a bit into the second one with the mod installed, and I visited a few other levels with map warp cheats (though I quickly died in most since I couldn't get weapon cheats to work). The textures aren't upgraded (unless you do so yourself with other mods), but modern-day lighting can make a big difference in how some of the game's areas look.

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  Low-polygon models, blurry textures, and low-resolution effects are replaced with shiny new upgrade in Portal with RTX . [credit: Nvidia ]

Valve's first-person puzzle-platformer Portal was a genuine phenomenon when it was released back in 2007 , and its core gameplay mechanics—solving puzzles and thwarting enemies by shooting interconnected portals onto various surfaces—still hold up today. But the game's visuals haven't aged as well, particularly its low-resolution textures; it was built using the same game engine and some of the same assets as 2004's Half-Life 2 , and there's only so much that a modern GPU can do to spruce it up.

Enter Portal with RTX , a remastering of the game with ray-tracing effects and other improvements that Nvidia says will be available for free to all Portal owners starting on December 8 . The update was originally announced in September alongside the RTX 4000-series GPUs. Developed by Lightspeed Studios, Portal with RTX doesn't just add fancy lighting effects to the original but also includes "hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures" and "enhanced high-poly models" that substantially overhaul the aging game's visuals for the modern era.

As a DirectX 9 game from early in the Xbox 360 lifespan, the original Portal runs well on just about anything, including old Intel-integrated GPUs. But Portal RTX 's system requirements are a lot higher; Nvidia lists the RTX 3060 as the minimum recommended GPU and says it can achieve "playable" 30 FPS frame rates at 1080p with DLSS enabled. Jumping to 60 FPS at 1080p requires an RTX 3080 with DLSS enabled, while hitting 60 FPS at 4K will require at least an RTX 4080 with DLSS 3 enabled. The CPU and RAM requirements also climb along with the GPU requirements (check the Nvidia-provided system requirements table below).

Enlarge / Concept art for Control 2 . (credit: Remedy Entertainment)

Control 2 , the sequel to the 2019 third-person shooter that showcased many high-end gaming PCs, has been announced by developer Remedy Entertainment in a blog post .

It's just entering pre-production, and it has no release date, but the announcement sets up some high expectations. The game's "initial" development budget is 50 million euros (currently around $52 million), suggesting that this will be a triple-A, big-budget action game at a large scale. For comparison, the first game's budget was just 30 million euros. Budgets for games like this often expand over the course of development, so it's possible Control 2 will cost double or more than Control to make.

Control 2 's target platforms are Windows PCs, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Remedy will self-publish the game on the PC, but 505 Games will act as the publisher for the console releases.