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.
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I checked the settings and Portal with RTX isn't even running DirectX 8, it's running DirectX 7! The original version of Portal won't run with DirectX 7, even if you try to force it to. But anyways, I whipped together this comparison and... wow (https://imgur.com/a/7BruztU).
The choice to even have a "Enhanced Graphics off" option feels like it was made to make people go "Wow the new graphics look so good." It was already disingenuous to include when the lighting doesn't work how it's supposed to on the old textures, but forcing a downgraded version of the games central element just brings this to a whole new level.
The choice to even have a "Enhanced Graphics off" option feels like it was made to make people go "Wow the new graphics look so good." It was already disingenuous to include when the lighting doesn't work how it's supposed to on the old textures, but forcing a downgraded version of the games central element just brings this to a whole new level.
BeachEpisode
1 year ago