There is still no release date on the Steam page for the Portal RTX, but Nvidia itself announces December 8th. as the release date. The update, which is free for owners of the original, will be released in time for the 15th birthday.
Ray tracing everywhere
Portal (buy now) RTX was developed by Nvidia’s own Lightspeed Studios, which is based on the work of Quake 2 and Minecraft RTX. The new Nvidia RTX Remix Mod platform was used. Every frame of the game is said to have been enhanced with “full ray tracing, new handcrafted high-resolution physics-based textures, and new improved high-poly models reminiscent of the originals.” Every light is ray-traced and casts shadows, indirect lighting with global illumination naturally brightens and darkens rooms, volumetric ray-traced lighting diffuses through fog and smoke, and shadows are pixel-perfect, according to Nvidia. In order to display the whole thing more smoothly, Portal RTX not only uses DLSS3, but also Nvidia Reflex. DLSS3 is said to increase performance by up to 2.8x, DLSS2 is available for non-RTX 40 cards.
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With RTX Remix, Portal runs in the background and the legacy rendering API is replaced with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This allows adding ray tracing to classic games like Portal; everything is updated in real time as lights and objects move. Light can then be thrown at the player from behind or from another room, in Portal with RTX the light even travels through portals. Glass refracts light, surfaces reflect details depending on their shininess, reflections can be thrown into the scene from behind, objects can reflect themselves, and off-camera indirect light illuminates and affects what you see, according to Nvidia.
Compared to Quake II and Minecraft with RTX, the path-traced ray tracing introduced with RTX Remix is more advanced, as light is reflected four times instead of once, “improving the quality, immersion and simulation of real light”. There are also several new ray tracing techniques such as RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) and Reservoir Spatio Temporal Importance Resampling Global Illumination (ReSTIR GI). The raytracing denoiser should work more efficiently. Particular emphasis is placed on the volumetric raytracing lighting, which converts the old fog effects into real, correctly simulated volumetry. The ray tracing emission particles and emission game elements are also designed to increase immersion.
Portal RTX: Release date set, RTX 4080 required for Ultra HD
(1) Which: Valve
Portal RTX: Heavy system requirements
These many ray tracing effects have their price, even when using DLSS 3. Portal with RTX is “incredibly demanding” and pushes graphics cards to their limits, according to Nvidia. At least 16 GiB memory, 25 GiB SSD space, a Core i7-6700 or a Ryzen 5 3600 and 8 GiB VRAM are required. With an RTX 3060 and high settings, it’s enough for 30 fps in Full HD. For Full HD with 60 fps you need an RTX 3080, a Core i7-9700K or a Ryzen 5 3600. For Ultra HD with 60 fps and ultra graphics you need an RTX 4080 with DLSS3, 32 GiB RAM and a Core i7 -12700K or a Ryzen 9 “5900” (actually an OEM CPU). Nvidia is silent about Radeon graphics cards, so far only a Vulkan-capable graphics card with Vulkan raytracing has been recommended as a recommendation on Steam. For Radeon cards, however, an upscaler like FSR would make sense.
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