Great news for Portal fans as Nvidia introduces full ray-tracing support for the game. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced RTX support for Portal during his 2022 GTC keynote on Tuesday. According to Nvidia, Portal along with many older games can now benefit from RTX, thanks to a new tool called RTX Remix.
Nvidia said in their blog post,
In Portal with RTX, full ray tracing transforms each level, enabling light to bounce and be affected by the scene’s geometry and materials. Every light is ray-traced and casts shadows, global illumination indirect lighting naturally illuminates and darkens rooms, volumetric ray-traced lighting scatters through fog and smoke, and shadows are pixel perfect.
Nvidia’s in-house Lightspeed Studios did extensive work to bring ray tracing to Portal. They introduced divots and bumps in Portal’s surface materials, which were not present in the original 2007 version of the game. Bumps and divots on the surface help to accurately bounce light and create detailed shadows and reflections.
Gamers who already own Portal will be able to download RTX version of the game as downloadable content. It is still unclear if gamers can buy Portal with RTX separately though.
Jensen Huang also added, “Nine of the ten most popular competitive games owe their existence to mods.” Nvidia announced RTX remix in order to accommodate thousands of modders who are at work to improve the graphics of existing games.
According to Nvidia, RTX Remix is a free modding platform that can add ray-tracing with just a few clicks and give modders a perfect tool to make remasters of their favorite games.
Along with Portal RTX, Nvidia also announced their new lineup of RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs.