Has Valve's plan for next-gen graphics restored Half-Life 3 hopes?

Valve

For the past couple of years, Valve's impenetrable fortress has felt, well, even less penetrable. Aside from its Steam Machines, we have little idea of what Gabe and his crew have been up to.

Valve recently told TechRadar that it will have a big Steam Machine presence at GDC 2015 - but what else might it show us?

For one thing, we now know that Valve will be on a panel titled 'glNext: The Future of High Performance Graphics (Presented by Valve)", where it will demo the successor to OpenGL, the current standard for graphics.

But Valve won't be the only one talking; EA, Epic Games and other will also be sitting on the panel to discuss the next big step in graphics.

Set Gordon free, man

As the presenter in this video speculates, Valve will need something to visual to demonstrate this new tech. In fact, it's even mentioned in the conference schedule: "We will present a technical breakdown of the API, advanced techniques and live demos of real-world applications running on glNext drivers and hardware."

This would be the perfect opportunity for Valve to announce a new game running the glNext tech. GDC might not be the time to announce Half-Life 3… or could it? There's also the possibility of Left 4 Dead 3, Portal 3, an entirely new IP, or just another boring demo.

Start your speculation engines, but March could be a pretty significant month for Valve - for more reasons than one.

Hugh Langley

Hugh Langley is the ex-News Editor of TechRadar. He had written for many magazines and websites including Business Insider, The Telegraph, IGN, Gizmodo, Entrepreneur Magazine, WIRED (UK), TrustedReviews, Business Insider Australia, Business Insider India, Business Insider Singapore, Wareable, The Ambient and more.


Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider covering Google and Alphabet, and has the unfortunate distinction of accidentally linking the TechRadar homepage to a rival publication.