this is utterly grim, nvidia rtx remix is to gaming what ai generated images are to art. the aesthetic of portal is completely neutered in favor of smudgy hi-res textures and overblown lighting.
not to mention that the new visuals actively detriment the original game's visual guiding and design!!! i've replayed this game a ton and i actually couldn't tell where to go sometimes because the visual clutter introduced by raytracing was so awful.
how excellent that nvidia has blessed us with the ability to make games look like unreal engine nintendo hire this man type shit.
not to mention that the new visuals actively detriment the original game's visual guiding and design!!! i've replayed this game a ton and i actually couldn't tell where to go sometimes because the visual clutter introduced by raytracing was so awful.
how excellent that nvidia has blessed us with the ability to make games look like unreal engine nintendo hire this man type shit.
This has to be the funniest marketing gimmick ever made. Honestly. It makes the Hatsune Miku Dominos promotion or the Saint's Row 4 ultimate edition seem tame.
For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu.If you want to play Portal 1 for free you can get this, push Alt+X and disable everything. [This ended up not being true, I forgot that I owned Portal 1.]
But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.
As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.
Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.
The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.
Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.
But.
But.
There's a worse problem.
Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.
When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...
...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.
And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.
I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.
The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.
For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu.
But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.
As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.
Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.
The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.
Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.
But.
But.
There's a worse problem.
Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.
When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...
...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.
And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.
I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.
The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.
RTX? More like FarTX because this freaking stinks.
A while back, NVIDIA did a version of Quake 2 with ray tracing. This was, by all accounts, fucking stupid, and frankly, a little insulting when the version of Quake 2 on steam was (and still is) a 20 year old Windows port that barely functions, and doesn't even contain the OST because it reads the OST off the CD it was originally released on.
But if there's something positive I can say about Quake 2 RTX that I can't say about this, it's that it's fucking hilarious. Quake 2 isn't exactly a great looking game (aside from it's age, it's general art direction just isn't even close to as good as Quake 1), and juxtaposing hyper realistic lighting onto a game where a singular level probably has less polygons than the Yandere Simulator toothbrush just looks extremely funny to me. Not good mind, you but it's at least a cool little novelty that you can laugh at for a level or two before switching back to the better looking version.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA's next game to add ray tracing to for absolutely no reason, Portal, is a bit to modern of a game to really have the anachronistic novelty that Quake 2 has. The ray tracing doesn't look bad like it did in Quake 2, but it doesn't really add anything to the game visually either. The only times I ever really even noticed it, it felt more distracting than cool looking.
But Portal with RTX takes things a step further: rather than just being the same game with new lighting, Portal with RTX is more or less a full remaster, replacing not only the lighting engine, but the textures as well. And this is where Portal with RTX falls from "Portal but it runs like shit" to "Portal but it looks like shit."
The new textures are ass. Portal's original textures aren't perfectly high res to where you wouldn't be able to see the pixels if you looked, but they were certainly not low res enough to make you go "Damn, that's a crunchy texture." As a result, the new textures, rather than trying to be higher res versions of the old textures, try to make the game look "better" by simply looking more complex and different.
Where these new textures fall flat is in that they simply don't have any of the actually important details of the original textures. The original textures looked dirty and worn, they really give the impression of a facility that maybe isn't falling apart yet, but certainly hasn't been cleaned in quite a while and is definitely abandoned. The new textures, on the other hand, look sleek and clean. There's still some grit there if you look really close, but it gives no where near the impression of an abandoned facility that the original textures do.
There's some other weird choices too. The portals themselves are redone and just look significantly more bland than the original portals. The intent seems to have been to make them show off the lighting better, but the lighting effect of the original actually looks cooler. The buttons are made transparent, and the cubes are redesigned to glow pretty colors, for no particular reason. Yet elements that don't show up until later have less effort put in, or aren't even redone at all. The companion cube, for example, is jarringly still using the EXACT SAME TEXTURE as the original game, meaning it doesn't look anything like any of the other cubes in the game.
It's as if the developers themselves didn't see this as anymore of a cool novelty that wears off in 20 seconds. The game only took me 90 minutes for christ's sake, you can't actually expect that people WONT see the end or something.
The game DOES feature the ability to switch back to the original textures, but the new lighting engine doesn't play well with the original texture's transparency, which all makes you ask why you aren't just playing the version that's a third of the size and DOESNT require a 3080 to run.
But if there's something positive I can say about Quake 2 RTX that I can't say about this, it's that it's fucking hilarious. Quake 2 isn't exactly a great looking game (aside from it's age, it's general art direction just isn't even close to as good as Quake 1), and juxtaposing hyper realistic lighting onto a game where a singular level probably has less polygons than the Yandere Simulator toothbrush just looks extremely funny to me. Not good mind, you but it's at least a cool little novelty that you can laugh at for a level or two before switching back to the better looking version.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA's next game to add ray tracing to for absolutely no reason, Portal, is a bit to modern of a game to really have the anachronistic novelty that Quake 2 has. The ray tracing doesn't look bad like it did in Quake 2, but it doesn't really add anything to the game visually either. The only times I ever really even noticed it, it felt more distracting than cool looking.
But Portal with RTX takes things a step further: rather than just being the same game with new lighting, Portal with RTX is more or less a full remaster, replacing not only the lighting engine, but the textures as well. And this is where Portal with RTX falls from "Portal but it runs like shit" to "Portal but it looks like shit."
The new textures are ass. Portal's original textures aren't perfectly high res to where you wouldn't be able to see the pixels if you looked, but they were certainly not low res enough to make you go "Damn, that's a crunchy texture." As a result, the new textures, rather than trying to be higher res versions of the old textures, try to make the game look "better" by simply looking more complex and different.
Where these new textures fall flat is in that they simply don't have any of the actually important details of the original textures. The original textures looked dirty and worn, they really give the impression of a facility that maybe isn't falling apart yet, but certainly hasn't been cleaned in quite a while and is definitely abandoned. The new textures, on the other hand, look sleek and clean. There's still some grit there if you look really close, but it gives no where near the impression of an abandoned facility that the original textures do.
There's some other weird choices too. The portals themselves are redone and just look significantly more bland than the original portals. The intent seems to have been to make them show off the lighting better, but the lighting effect of the original actually looks cooler. The buttons are made transparent, and the cubes are redesigned to glow pretty colors, for no particular reason. Yet elements that don't show up until later have less effort put in, or aren't even redone at all. The companion cube, for example, is jarringly still using the EXACT SAME TEXTURE as the original game, meaning it doesn't look anything like any of the other cubes in the game.
It's as if the developers themselves didn't see this as anymore of a cool novelty that wears off in 20 seconds. The game only took me 90 minutes for christ's sake, you can't actually expect that people WONT see the end or something.
The game DOES feature the ability to switch back to the original textures, but the new lighting engine doesn't play well with the original texture's transparency, which all makes you ask why you aren't just playing the version that's a third of the size and DOESNT require a 3080 to run.
Holy shit! There has never been something released before that I dislike yet absolutely want so badly!
To write more seriously, I was extremely surprised when Nvidia shadow-dropped on a livestream their latest technology in which they are able to implement RTX into most games that support DirectX8 and 9. For many this came out of nowhere and to a bigger surprise a playable showcase was being released; players could experience the entirety of Portal with RTX-Remix on.
From a technical standpoint, Portal with RTX is nothing more than a sublime marvel and an exciting look into the future of graphics development. The RTX part doesn't actually mess with any of the game files itself but instead acts like a wrapper. The gist is that modders with just a click of a button, RTX Remix will take all render data for textures, lighting etc. and load it into the application itself, allowing modders to change these to their hearts content. This new software seems to have no downsides, doesn't it? Except your game must have a fixed function pipeline renderer so games like New Vegas won't work. Hooray.
However, the decision to revolve the tech demo around Portal is in itself flawed and unluckily damaging to what Nvidia want to show. To put it simply, the RTX often works against Portal's art direction. When we have an environment that is supposed to be decrepit and abandoned, it no longer makes any sense to have shiny, reflective surfaces. When we are supposed to have sterile blue lighting and blue surfaces that help invoke a feeling of isolation, we are given instead a 2017 Minecraft shader pack. What we lose in this "DLC" is important details in the game itself as well. The walls are originally supposed to be made from lunar rock and now everything seems to be made out of Portal 2's metal. Albeit impressive, pushing out light reflections and HD textures seems to be losing what made Portal even special in the first place.
This isn't really Nvidia fault, he technology is there and it's impressive. If you want to replay Portal and perhaps want to check out something more refreshing then try the RTX mod (if your PC can even handle it, my 3060 struggled even with 30fps). However there is not any reason to play this over the original if it's your first time into the Portal series. It's weird how except for DirectX issues this showcase wasn't done for Portal 2, since the game deals with more open spaces and opportunities for fauna reflection. However we can only wait to see where this goes in the future...
just wished it worked for New Vegas :(
To write more seriously, I was extremely surprised when Nvidia shadow-dropped on a livestream their latest technology in which they are able to implement RTX into most games that support DirectX8 and 9. For many this came out of nowhere and to a bigger surprise a playable showcase was being released; players could experience the entirety of Portal with RTX-Remix on.
From a technical standpoint, Portal with RTX is nothing more than a sublime marvel and an exciting look into the future of graphics development. The RTX part doesn't actually mess with any of the game files itself but instead acts like a wrapper. The gist is that modders with just a click of a button, RTX Remix will take all render data for textures, lighting etc. and load it into the application itself, allowing modders to change these to their hearts content. This new software seems to have no downsides, doesn't it? Except your game must have a fixed function pipeline renderer so games like New Vegas won't work. Hooray.
However, the decision to revolve the tech demo around Portal is in itself flawed and unluckily damaging to what Nvidia want to show. To put it simply, the RTX often works against Portal's art direction. When we have an environment that is supposed to be decrepit and abandoned, it no longer makes any sense to have shiny, reflective surfaces. When we are supposed to have sterile blue lighting and blue surfaces that help invoke a feeling of isolation, we are given instead a 2017 Minecraft shader pack. What we lose in this "DLC" is important details in the game itself as well. The walls are originally supposed to be made from lunar rock and now everything seems to be made out of Portal 2's metal. Albeit impressive, pushing out light reflections and HD textures seems to be losing what made Portal even special in the first place.
This isn't really Nvidia fault, he technology is there and it's impressive. If you want to replay Portal and perhaps want to check out something more refreshing then try the RTX mod (if your PC can even handle it, my 3060 struggled even with 30fps). However there is not any reason to play this over the original if it's your first time into the Portal series. It's weird how except for DirectX issues this showcase wasn't done for Portal 2, since the game deals with more open spaces and opportunities for fauna reflection. However we can only wait to see where this goes in the future...
just wished it worked for New Vegas :(
Clássico atemporal, e nunca vai deixar de ser. É conciso e se preocupa apenas com o essencial, o que é traduzida pelo tamanho da duração do jogo e o tamanho do seu impacto nessa mídia. Uma única mecânica, abrir e fechar portais, em que o jogo se envolve por ela e permite ao jogador quebrar o design do jogo com a mecânica, se assim ele quiser.
Isso é foda, por que no final das contas, Portal é um jogo sobre ruptura. Somos Chell, uma mera cobaia comandada pela GladOS, até que não somos mais. É uma jornada sobre emancipação a partir da ruptura do exercício de pensar, pensar e pensar nos usos mais mirabolantes que a Portal Gun e toda a fisicalidade que são oferecidas nos permitem.
O bolo é uma mentira, assim como os avisos nas paredes desse laboratório vazio e enigmático nos dizem, mas o que é verdade? Portal 2 nos responde!
Ah, joguei a versão RTX, e é bem bacana e se parece até mais com um remaster por que substituiram bastante texturas e tal, mas é bem pesado e tem muito problema com perfomance. Deu pra tirar ótimos prints, entretanto: https://i.imgur.com/xwvxi04.jpeg
Isso é foda, por que no final das contas, Portal é um jogo sobre ruptura. Somos Chell, uma mera cobaia comandada pela GladOS, até que não somos mais. É uma jornada sobre emancipação a partir da ruptura do exercício de pensar, pensar e pensar nos usos mais mirabolantes que a Portal Gun e toda a fisicalidade que são oferecidas nos permitem.
O bolo é uma mentira, assim como os avisos nas paredes desse laboratório vazio e enigmático nos dizem, mas o que é verdade? Portal 2 nos responde!
Ah, joguei a versão RTX, e é bem bacana e se parece até mais com um remaster por que substituiram bastante texturas e tal, mas é bem pesado e tem muito problema com perfomance. Deu pra tirar ótimos prints, entretanto: https://i.imgur.com/xwvxi04.jpeg
this is how portal will look like in 2013
Much as this made me nostalgic for playing Portal at 17 fps on the family laptop in 2009, the new art assets are giving Fallout New Vegas graphical overhaul mod. The fact that the lighting consistently obscures whether a distant surface can hold a portal during the escape sequence is a stronger argument against ray tracing than I could ever form.
kind of unreal how much of a chokehold this game had on The Culture back in the day considering there really is not that much to it - I beat my playthrough in two hours.
the RTX port doesn't run consistently smoothly but it sure does look pretty. goes to show how much a solid art direction can go in keeping a game relatively ageless. i really could have done without all the cutesy nvidia advertisements tossed in though, those do a lot to really take you out of the immersion (which is a bad thing because the half-life universe is nothing without atmosphere).
the RTX port doesn't run consistently smoothly but it sure does look pretty. goes to show how much a solid art direction can go in keeping a game relatively ageless. i really could have done without all the cutesy nvidia advertisements tossed in though, those do a lot to really take you out of the immersion (which is a bad thing because the half-life universe is nothing without atmosphere).
Portal com RTX é o que o nome diz e nada muito além disso, é uma ótima forma de voltar a jogar o game que é excelente, mas não é um remake, muita coisa ainda é similar visualmente ao original, vale a pena mas pelo que vi ele é bem mal otimizado, joguei pelo GeForce Now, rolou algumas travadas mas bem raramente.
Pretty neat little tech demo, though it's not much more than that sadly.
Some of the changes made to the art style are very jarring as someone who's played Portal 1 and 2 to death. Some changes range from questionable to outright bizarre, as well as some important props just being completely unchanged such as the companion cube which feels incredibly jarring. The game's performance is also less than stellar, barely breaking 10fps with an RTX 3060.
This game is worth trying if you want to waste an hour, but beyond that I don't see it having much lasting appeal besides being a fun little oddity to test how strong your PC is.
Some of the changes made to the art style are very jarring as someone who's played Portal 1 and 2 to death. Some changes range from questionable to outright bizarre, as well as some important props just being completely unchanged such as the companion cube which feels incredibly jarring. The game's performance is also less than stellar, barely breaking 10fps with an RTX 3060.
This game is worth trying if you want to waste an hour, but beyond that I don't see it having much lasting appeal besides being a fun little oddity to test how strong your PC is.
yup
that sure is portal
with RTX enabled
that sure is portal
with RTX enabled
This actually rules, you're all just babies.
WOW! IT LOOKS SO FUCKING GOOD! WAIT GUYS CAN U SMELL THAT? IS THAT BURNING? WHY IS MY GPU TURNING MOLTEN RED? SHIT LOOKS LIKE I NEED TO BUY ANOTHER CARD! I THINK ILL GET THE LATEST MODEL- OH WOW, THATS NOT A BAD DEAL, ONLY $4K? THANKS NVIDIA! IM GLAD YOUR PUTTING THE CONSUMER FIRST
Good visuals but that's about the only thing that this supposed "remaster" has going for it.
I have a 3080 and performance is just abysmal, can't get to 120 FPS on a 15 year old remaster. Clearly just a BS excuse for Nvidia to market their 40 Series Cards. To any newcomers, just play the original version of this game and not this soulless commercial for Nvidia
I have a 3080 and performance is just abysmal, can't get to 120 FPS on a 15 year old remaster. Clearly just a BS excuse for Nvidia to market their 40 Series Cards. To any newcomers, just play the original version of this game and not this soulless commercial for Nvidia
STOP DOING HYPER REALISM
VIDEO GAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE
YEARS OF SO CALLED TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND IN MAKING A GAME HAVE MORE REALISTIC VISUAL AESTHETICS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 4
Wanted to look better anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called "ART DIRECTION"
"Yes give me SLIGHTLY more smudges on that brown stained floor, give me slightly more lighting that completely destroys the art style at the cost of taking HALF A YEAR from my graphics card's life expectancy." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Look at what NVidia and it's mafia of bitcoin miners have been demanding your money all this time, with all the decades worth of beautiful low spec games in your backlog.
???????????
"Hello I would like my games to run and look worse please"
They have played us for absolute fools.
VIDEO GAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE
YEARS OF SO CALLED TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND IN MAKING A GAME HAVE MORE REALISTIC VISUAL AESTHETICS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 4
Wanted to look better anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called "ART DIRECTION"
"Yes give me SLIGHTLY more smudges on that brown stained floor, give me slightly more lighting that completely destroys the art style at the cost of taking HALF A YEAR from my graphics card's life expectancy." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Look at what NVidia and it's mafia of bitcoin miners have been demanding your money all this time, with all the decades worth of beautiful low spec games in your backlog.
???????????
"Hello I would like my games to run and look worse please"
They have played us for absolute fools.
This week, fortnite got an update to Unreal Engine 5.1, and it is remarkable. You don't have to be a lover of the corpo-cartoon artstyle to appreciate the massive improvement in tech, with lighting being a particular focus. But as impressive as that is, perhaps moreso is the integration. You'll be lucky to find anyone saying it "doesn't look like fortnite". Models still pop out in the lighting the same way, the reflections arent out of place, and many of the most obvious changes, like denser foliage which the light beatufiully scatters off, are both quite well measured and are brought in with a whole new map. It is a wonderful demonstration that heavily stylised games can (sometimes) benefit from new tech, as well as a masterclass in making changes in the right places to integrate with an extremely well defined art style.
In the same week, Nvidia rereleases Valve's best looking and possibly most cherished game with a similar setup - new look with a particular focus on lighting. Except it looks like shit.
The general assets are the main issue. Stock Portal has this subtlety to a lot of it's assets and textures especially in the first half of the game that slowly creeps up more and more towards the conclusion. What initially seem like sterile test chamber walls show deliberate signs of age, scuff marks, and are slightly stained. Even in the very first room, the table is slightly scuffed. It's subtle, but pervasive stuff and is one of those things that gives the game a bit of an uneasy vibe. The new assets just straight up do not look like they fit together at all. When you're in sections where bits of white wall combine with the square pyramid-ish walls it just looks super off to the point where i'd assume they were outsourced to completely different studios or something, they dont look like they're from the same game at all and the same could be said for an awful lot of the assets.
The lighting is also outright comical at times. In the final boss fight the floor is so fucking reflective it's hard to parse. The reflections in general are seriously a problem and combined with a massive increase in constrast creates a whole bunch of very ugly scenes, particularly in the first half. The second half of the game fares better with it's more industrial environments and larger focus on shadow casting, which is probably the one thing i'd say is the one legitimate improvement in RTX portal, but it's a needle in a haystack and you'll be lucky to find a few frames of gameplay where there isnt some horribly judged asset or blinding reflection to be a bigger distraction.
What really sucks about Portal RTX is that it should work. A more subtle use of the tech, textures which were touched up rather than replaced and maybe focusing the super eyecatching effects on specific areas could have made Portal look generally improved. Even a drastic change in art style like say, the Demons Souls remake could have worked in it's own way in a different vision sort of thing to better show off the tech (and yes, that sort of approach is it's own can of worms). But what's here feels lazy, unthought, and destructive, and it's hard to tell what it's even really going for other than OOOH REFLECTIONS. Like a horse that lays down in front of you asking for a beating, this is the truest example we will probably ever get of companies putting tech, bigger numbers and flashiness before artistry. Hollow and pathetic. If everything made with this modset/whatever it is looks like this, it can all rot.
In the same week, Nvidia rereleases Valve's best looking and possibly most cherished game with a similar setup - new look with a particular focus on lighting. Except it looks like shit.
The general assets are the main issue. Stock Portal has this subtlety to a lot of it's assets and textures especially in the first half of the game that slowly creeps up more and more towards the conclusion. What initially seem like sterile test chamber walls show deliberate signs of age, scuff marks, and are slightly stained. Even in the very first room, the table is slightly scuffed. It's subtle, but pervasive stuff and is one of those things that gives the game a bit of an uneasy vibe. The new assets just straight up do not look like they fit together at all. When you're in sections where bits of white wall combine with the square pyramid-ish walls it just looks super off to the point where i'd assume they were outsourced to completely different studios or something, they dont look like they're from the same game at all and the same could be said for an awful lot of the assets.
The lighting is also outright comical at times. In the final boss fight the floor is so fucking reflective it's hard to parse. The reflections in general are seriously a problem and combined with a massive increase in constrast creates a whole bunch of very ugly scenes, particularly in the first half. The second half of the game fares better with it's more industrial environments and larger focus on shadow casting, which is probably the one thing i'd say is the one legitimate improvement in RTX portal, but it's a needle in a haystack and you'll be lucky to find a few frames of gameplay where there isnt some horribly judged asset or blinding reflection to be a bigger distraction.
What really sucks about Portal RTX is that it should work. A more subtle use of the tech, textures which were touched up rather than replaced and maybe focusing the super eyecatching effects on specific areas could have made Portal look generally improved. Even a drastic change in art style like say, the Demons Souls remake could have worked in it's own way in a different vision sort of thing to better show off the tech (and yes, that sort of approach is it's own can of worms). But what's here feels lazy, unthought, and destructive, and it's hard to tell what it's even really going for other than OOOH REFLECTIONS. Like a horse that lays down in front of you asking for a beating, this is the truest example we will probably ever get of companies putting tech, bigger numbers and flashiness before artistry. Hollow and pathetic. If everything made with this modset/whatever it is looks like this, it can all rot.
They added graphics to Portal 🥶
I'm a tech enthusiast, an enjoyer of feats from all eras of computing, and while on paper Portal with RTX(why is it named like this? just be normal and name it Portal RTX please) is impressive, it's a dogshit showcase for an otherwise fantastic number of technologies. The fact that DLSS "ultra performance" is practically mandatory for a remotely playable experience on an RTX 3080 at 4k is a joke. It showing off new tech isn't an excuse either. Others have already dug into the asset swaps a lot already and I 100% agree, the new assets look out of place, mismatched and at odds with even the new lighting. This entire thing feels phoned in.
You'd think with a tech demo, you'd also bother to make it run well on your all of your GPUs; not just the one that costs $1,800+ USD.
You'd think with a tech demo, you'd also bother to make it run well on your all of your GPUs; not just the one that costs $1,800+ USD.
No amount of tensor cores, teraflops, or fractals could spark joy as easily or readily as hearing the Portal radio in its unfiltered glory.
crime
A perfect demo in how depressingly overblown RTX is. A decade and a half later and horribly awfully optimized, it can barely be played on the lowest-end RTX card, with sluggish response times frequently dipping below 25 FPS, and godawful disgusting bloom smearing the lens constantly. It is honestly depressing how much of a waste of time, money, and resources are spent on basically nothing, to recreate the astounding carefully made static lightmaps in barely-functional mediocre realtime lighting.
F. See me after class.
F. See me after class.
I'm sure this would be very cool if I had a $1,599 graphics card. For me though, it's just a challenge to beat Portal with 15 FPS
All of the other reviews are about tech stuff, but since I know nothing about all of that, I'll default to the basics:
This is Portal.
Portal is awesome!
This is Portal.
Portal is awesome!
Portal but it runs like shit lol
cool LIGHTS!!!
cool LIGHTS!!!
my game didn't crash but the game was still a little jank
but as a free little add on
its a fun visual thing to explore
but as a free little add on
its a fun visual thing to explore
Portal 1 pour les riches
Edit : Cool quand t'es riche
Edit : Cool quand t'es riche
I was surprised by how decently it respected the original art style while showcasing RTX, though in some parts, more so by the end the lighting was a little overexposed so it made some surfaces look like portal adequate when they were not, making it difficult to see where to go and by consequence affecting the original game design, so even for someone like me who has played the original game several times it was difficult to tell where I had to go.
Sempre gostei do jogo original, mas essa versão é realmente nem muito interessante. Acho que vale a pena jogar essa versão apenas se você já tem há algum tempo vontade de jogar, mas nunca teve um motivo pra isso.
Si de por si Portal me parece un 10 de 10 agreguenle el poder del trazado de rayos y se ve increiblemente hermoso. Muy bonito lo que lograron hacer con el juego.