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Portal with RTX it will only be available in two 48 hours, but we had the opportunity to try it out for a few days in advance. Portal with RTX is the edition of the famous title of Valvealthough it would be better to call it DLC, modernized by NVIDIA with a series of technologies that literally change its characteristics.
The original game came out way back in 2007 and Portal with RTX does not change the gameplay: we are faced with a title of the “puzzle” genre where, armed with the Gravity Gun and our intellect, we will have to solve puzzles to pass between the various levels.
In order to experiment with new technologies and demonstrate the benefits of ray tracing and DLSS, NVIDIA has modernized other games like Quake II and Minecraft over the yearsapplying what the company defines “full ray tracing” or, if you prefer, path tracing. In addition, this time we are faced with a so-called “showcase” of RTX Remix, the modding tool created by NVIDIA precisely to restore past titles to their splendor.
The first impact with Portal with RTX highlights a clear improvement in textures, but above all the totally new lighting which gives an air of modernity to the game. We have made some comparative screenshots in which you can observe the marked step forward (click on the images to enlarge them):
Of fundamental importance is the behavior of the light, how it is reflected from contours and materials, how it is influenced by colored surfaces, how it diffuses in the atmosphere, how it is refracted in water and glass and how the intensity is reduced with successive rebounds. The combined effect affects the final look of Portal with RTX clearly, even in the most barren scenario.
Path tracing, unlike ray tracing, unifies all effects of light such as shadows, reflections, global illumination, refractions, and more in a single ray tracing algorithm. This means that in Portal with RTX every ray of light is tracked. According to NVIDIA, the title of Valve it is even more advanced than Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTXas the light bounces up to 4 times more and includes new RT features such as RTXDI and Restir GI.
NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) allows innumerable sources of direct light, regardless of their size, to cast path-traced light and shadow. NVIDIA Reservoir Spatio-Temporal Importance Resampling Global Illumination (ReSTIR GI) improves indirect light, allowing it to punch through a scene and light up the dark corners that aren’t directly lit. And it also works smarter than previous ray-traced global illumination techniques, improving the efficiency of NVIDIA’s ray-traced denoiser.
NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) is a new spatio-temporal ray-traced denoising library that assists in real-time conversion of ray-traced raw output, with higher performance and higher quality. These are some of the technologies implemented in this Portal with RTX.
Illustrated the novelties of this modern makeover of Portal, let’s talk about performance and configurations. We don’t want to hide anything from you, so we have to tell you right away: Portal with RTX is a production decidedly heavy, as path tracing undermines even the most powerful GPUs. The game requirements say it all:
Click to enlarge
NVIDIA explained to us that RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti owners can only achieve playable frame rates with the help of DLSS 2 at 1080p resolution. We we did tests with RTX 4090, 4080 and 3090 Ti which confirm the decidedly heavy nature of the title. Here are our benchmarks:
Portal with RTX without DLSS can’t be played at an adequate frame rate at all and this is precisely what NVIDIA wants to highlight with this release. More precisely, the company wants show the capabilities of DLSS 3which we have already had the opportunity to appreciate in some titles in the test of the new cards and which is confirmed as an important step forward here too.
We had serious problems running the title on Radeon GPUs, and that’s why we gave up the comparison, focusing on NVIDIA solutions and mostly showing you the technical improvement of the game. Anyway, it’s coming soon a “Day 0” patch which will perhaps improve compatibility.
That said, we would like to remind all concerned that Portal with RTX will be rendered available as free DLC for the Valve title starting December 8 at 15:00.
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