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.

I was playing with the DLSS set at ultra performance so I don't know how much benefit I was really getting out of the RTX with some of the low resolution but at least it ran at 60fps or more. I suppose there was some cool lighting and reflections but I didn't really take that much notice of it to be honest. Maybe it will be more jaw dropping if I get something better than a 3060.

As for the game itself, I've never been that enamoured with the first Portal. It had cool ideas that I thought were better developed in the more well rounded sequel. The humour is funny but it was ruined by the internet. Still, as a game you can finish in an hour or so, it's decently fun time.

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.

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.

Edit: I think my original comments were a bit too reactionary, so I've toned it down. Some of my original sentiments still remain, however.

I don't understand this has prompted the defensive reaction it has. It's worth remembering when going in:

This is a free, novelty tech demo for high end Nvidia GPUs

- Yes, it will run like crap on anything less than a 3080 with the bells and whistles on.
- Yes, the textures were all modified to prioritize showcasing that tech over original art.

But it neither replaces the original game nor costs anything. I'm sure a modder will make a new version of the textures that both works with the tech and looks closer to the original.

It's fun. If you can run it, give it a shot.

I've seen a lot of comments (and video essays) that — whether intentional or not — give the impression that this project was iill-conceived or done without any heart, and I can agree that some visual changes don't maintain the original visual identity and atmosphere.

However, despite being attached to Nvidia, this really is a small team "mod." Prototype projects like this don't generate revenue and were likely justified with an advertising fund. The labor required likely wasn't huge, as this was one testbed for their upcoming "Remix" technology, but the effort of creating a whole game's worth of uprezzed assets probably still made this a very 'inefficient' use of that advertising fund.

What I'm saying is that this wasn't comparable to Fortnite's switch to UE5, as a recent comparison I've seen. That game and the engine are Epic's main business now. Nvidia is a hardware engineering group that needed a showcase project running quickly. Critique it as you will, but keep that context in mind.

I think I would have been less kind about this if it wasn't free.

The settings list Nvidia provided recently definitely helped make this run at a stable framerate (it looked around 30 for me on my 3080), but there were still some dips. There were some moments while playing that I thought looked neat lighting wise, but it's definitely more of a novelty than a groundbreaking change in the pc world as it stands currently. I can't say I had an experience that felt better than just replaying vanilla Portal.

yup

that sure is portal

with RTX enabled

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 :(

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.

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.

This is the future of videogames? A feature that even on a 15 old games will make it barely run on the average computer? A graphics setting that needs you to upscale the resolution to a blurry mess to even be playable and still reduces your fps to at least 1/10 of what it would be without it. Just work on it for a decade or so, then get back to us. DLSS looks very, very bad and the miniscule changes that ray tracing brings add nothing to the gameplay and isn't nearly as impressive as it's made out to be, especially at the enormous costs it comes with performance wise. And both are a step in the wrong direction when it comes to computer games. Use it on consoles or something, they seem to think 30fps is acceptable.