Valve’s first-person puzzle-platformer Portal was a real phenomenon when it was released back in 2007, and its core game mechanics of solving puzzles and destroying enemies via interconnected portals on various surfaces are still relevant today. But the game’s visuals haven’t aged either, especially the low-res textures; it was built using the same game engine and some of the same resources as 2004’s Half-Life 2, and a modern GPU can only do so much to beautify it.
Enter Portal with RTX, a remastered game with ray-traced effects, and other enhancements that Nvidia says will be available for free to all Portal owners starting December 8th. The update was originally announced in September alongside the RTX 4000 series GPUs. Developed by Lightspeed Studios, Portal with RTX not only adds whimsical lighting effects to the original, but also includes “physically based, hand-crafted, high-resolution textures”and “improved high-poly models”that significantly change the visuals of the aging game for the modern era.
As a DirectX 9 game from the early days of the Xbox 360, the original Portal runs well on just about anything, including older integrated Intel GPUs. But the system requirements of Portal RTX are much higher; Nvidia lists the RTX 3060 as the minimum recommended GPU and says it can hit a “gaming”framerate of 30fps at 1080p with DLSS enabled. Going to 60 FPS at 1080p requires an RTX 3080 with DLSS enabled, and reaching 60 FPS at 4K requires at least an RTX 4080 with DLSS 3 enabled. CPU and RAM requirements also increase along with GPU requirements (see below system requirements table provided by Nvidia).
However, the game can run on “all ray tracing compatible GPUs”including older RTX 2000 series, AMD RX 6000 and RX 7000 series, and Intel’s recently released Arc A series GPUs. But overall high requirements and reliance on proprietary DLSS upscaling to achieve playable frame rates can make it difficult to run on anything other than a modern GeForce GPU.
However, for those who can meet the hardware requirements, the updated lighting and textures are a great excuse to revisit (or discover!) the strange world of Portal without having to revisit 15-year-old textures, character models, and lighting effects. Modding Platform The Nvidia RTX Remix used to remaster Portal will also be released to the public at some point, making it easier to create updated versions of older DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games with upscaled AI textures and modern lighting effects.