NVIDIA's upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX project has major visual improvements: new HEV suit has 34x more polygons than Valve's original HEV suit in Half-Life 2.
It is made using Nvidia's RTX Studio, that is why it's called RTX.
It's also important to note that RTX is long past being just Nvidia's implementation of real time ray tracing, it is much bigger now as a suite of enhancements, technologies and tools.
In other words, it expanded into more of the same anti-competitive "only we get to do this" functionality as all their other features.
Only we do compute shaders! Oh ATI does compute shaders now? That's boring, only we do physics! Oh ATI does physics now? That's boring, only we do raytracing! Oh AMD does raytracing now? That's boring, only we do upscaling! Oh AMD does upscaling now? That's boring, only we do, uh, our exclusively branded nostalgia bait!
I despise the marketing for these projects with "RTX on" vs off when the entire scene is replaced with a much higher quality set of textures and models
The problem with ray tracing is that the most effective way to make it shine is on something hasn't shown potential with extra textures (like normal map) and PBR.
It looks better, sure, but marginally better, which is to say something as HL2 was released in 2004. I replayed it last year (the "update") and it still holds up so well: models and textures are old, sure, but animations, face animations in particular, barely show their age.
Anyway, this remake is apparently made by the same team that created the Portal: Prelude RTX mod, which (according to the Steam reviews) runs terribly. I wish I was more excited, but I can't say I am.