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.
8 Comments
@DeemonAndGames It's frankly kind of childish in its obviousness. Imagine an 8yo leaving drawings of Sonic around the house in the hopes their parents will buy them Frontiers. Just an utterly laughable situation.
And yeah, I'm a big fan of Valve's utilitarian/brutalist designs. I was really thankful that HL Alyx stuck to it religiously despite the 20 year tech leap.
And yeah, I'm a big fan of Valve's utilitarian/brutalist designs. I was really thankful that HL Alyx stuck to it religiously despite the 20 year tech leap.
Raytracing is just such a hard technique to use in conjunction with purposeful lighting direction like what Valve does with Portal. Something like Control lends itself much better to the technology, but it's a rare case of Remedy's art goals for that game already meshing with raytracing. Even studios like Pixar know how to tweak rendering profiles so that their final ray-traced video matches their concepts and storyboards—slapping any genericized RTX profile on something, old or new, ain't gonna cut it. NVidia's mistake is assuming that people playing Portal in 2024 are gonna fall for cheap tricks like this. Frankly, while I'm intrigued by projects like Render96 and other fanmade implementations of raytracing, it's not enough to justify plunking down on overpriced GPUs this year or the next. (If anything, I'm hopeful that Intel fully sorts out their driver situation and reaches parity on video encoding features so I can switch to them.)
One thing that doesn't sit right with me is that this remix of Portal is based off of the ancient DirectX 8 version of the game, with scuffed lighting and primitive-looking portals. Is that an intentional choice so as to make the side-by-side screenshots more impressive, or a genuine hardware restriction? Don't know, I just don't like it. Deny the raytracing airfryer and precalculate textures like mama used to.
@PasokonDeacon I'm a bit a raytracing cynic because right now the only applications I've seen for it are "needlessly dolling up older games to fit an arbitrary standard of 'modern'" and having minimally better shadows/reflections in modern games. Pathtracing looks amazing, sure, but that performance hit is gnarly and like its wimpier cousin, I can't see it having much application for games that are very deliberate in their artstyle. Can you imagine adding it to something like Hi-Fi Rush? HA.
@BeachEpisode I have no idea, though the cynic in me says that it's probably them trying to shill RTX even harder by making ""old Portal""" look so bad.
@BeachEpisode I have no idea, though the cynic in me says that it's probably them trying to shill RTX even harder by making ""old Portal""" look so bad.
IMO Nvidia's "Lightspeed Studios" likely picked the older version running with DX8 because RTX Remix becomes increasingly fragile once you go further into DX9+ territory. That and further decent-ish documentation for the 2007 version of Source and Morrowind would explain why those two games were the first to have officially announced RTX remasters*, even if the latter was allegedly fan created.
yes quake 2 was the earliest but q2vkpt was in progress for years as some german's college project and not designed for specific vendors until nvidia hopped on
yes quake 2 was the earliest but q2vkpt was in progress for years as some german's college project and not designed for specific vendors until nvidia hopped on
it actually requires that you own portal so you can;t just play it for free ._.
@SenkaiKasa D'oh.
DeemonAndGames
3 months ago
Excellent review!