Black Mesa, the well-known remake of the first entry in the Half-Life series developed by Crowbar Collective, looks great with modded path tracing, but it also proves, once again, how gaming hardware is still not at a point where it can run even older games with full path tracing at high resolutions without upscalers and frame generation.

A new video shared on YouTube today by MxBenchmarkPC shows the game’s Remixed mod running with RTX Remix path tracing, highlighting how path tracing, alongside the other improvements featured in the mod, significantly improves visuals, but also completely tanks performance even on a powerful GPU like the RTX 5080. In the side-by-side shots at the beginning of the video, it’s highlighted via a performance overlay how the game can go from running in the 200-plus FPS range without path tracing to the high 30s, low-to-mid 40s range with path tracing with NVIDIA DLSS in Performance mode. As such, Frame Generation becomes a necessity to run the game at higher, more playable framerates with path tracing.

The Black Mesa Remixed mod, which can be downloaded from ModDB, introduces plenty of improvements to the remake of the first Half-Life game released in 2020. It relights the inbound train ride and parts of the laboratory, and introduces five new meshes including 2K and 4K textures, 10 new meshes that were only present as texture in the original game, 40 to 50 very high quality materials built from the ground up and around 100 materials created from the original colormap using a mixture of techniques and workflows. As such, the mod is worth trying out even without path tracing to experience a small portion of the Half-Life remake like never before.