Portal with RTX is now available on Steam
Nvidia’s free ray-traced Portal mod is now available for free on Steam
To celebrate the launch of their RTX 40 series, Nvidia has created a new ray tracing mod for Portal that remasters the game with path tracing, high resolution physically based textures, high detail models, and more. This is one of Nvidia’s best showcases for ray tracing yet, and it uses every bit of performance that the company’s latest GPUs have to offer.
Portal with RTX is now available on Steam for free to all owners of Portal, giving PC gamers with compatible hardware a new way to play Valve’s classic puzzle platformer.
Path tracing is a form of ray tracing that is incredibly intensive, effectively offering all lighting effects such as shadows, reflections, global illumination, refractions and more within a single algorithm. As such, Portal with RTX requires incredibly strong hardware to run, and it relies on Nvidia’s DLSS technology to run well. With this in mind, users of Non-Nvidia DXR compatible hardware should expect Portal with RTX to run poorly on their systems.
Portal with RTX is designed to be a showcase for Nvidia’s ray tracing technology and their AI-based DLSS Super Resolution (DLSS 2) and DLSS Frame Generation (DLSS 3) technologies. To run at 4K 60 FPS, Portal with RTX players require an RTX 4080 graphics card with DLSS Super resolution and DLSS Frame Generation enabled. Without these technologies, Portal with RTX will run at low framerates on even Nvidia hardware.
Portal with RTX is a free DLC for all Portal owners developed by NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios. Experience the critically acclaimed and award-winning Portal™ reimagined with ray tracing. Every frame of gameplay is upgraded with stunning full ray tracing, new, hand-crafted hi-res physically based textures, and new, enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals, all in stunning 4K. In Portal with RTX, full ray tracing transforms each level, enabling light to bounce and be affected by the scene’s geometry and materials. Every light is ray-traced and casts shadows, global illumination indirect lighting naturally illuminates and darkens rooms, volumetric ray-traced lighting scatters through fog and smoke, and shadows are pixel perfect. Portal with RTX is compatible with all ray-tracing capable GPUs.
While Portal with RTX is designed to be playable on all ray tracing capable graphics card, it is in a sense a marketing tool that is designed to showcase the benefits of Nvidia’s hardware ray tracing capabilities and the company’s DLSS technologies. Portal with RTX is hyper-optimised for Nvidia’s RTX hardware, and that means that users of current-generation Intel or AMD graphics cards will have a hard time running this game. Nvidia did not make Portal with RTX to sell graphics cards from their competitors.
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