If you’re looking for a reason to revisit the beloved Portal game, all of 15 years post-launch, then Nvidia has you covered. In some of this week’s most unexpected news, Valve’s classic first-person puzzle game, Portal, is set to receive a free update this November. Thanks to Nvidia, the original Portal game, first released in 2007 and set in the same universe as Valve’s Half-Life series, will be getting a ray tracing boost.
During Nvidia’s GeForce Beyond show today, Nvidia unveiled “Portal with RTX”, an update introducing full ray tracing to the game. As with the previous Nvidia-sponsored ray tracing updates, Portal with RTX will only be available for PC. However, unlike the updates to Quake 2 and Minecraft, Portal with RTX will be the first game that forms part of a new project called RTX Remix.
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RTX Remix is an upcoming tool that will make it possible to add ray tracing to classic games. The tool will require an Nvidia RTX graphics card to run. As for Portal with RTX, the wording used during the announcement suggests that the ray tracing update will be available on any hardware capable of running Vulkan ray-traced games, but as of now, nothing has yet been confirmed.
Portal‘s official description on its Steam page reads:
“Portal is a new single player game from Valve. Set in the mysterious Aperture Science Laboratories, Portal has been called one of the most innovative new games on the horizon and will offer gamers hours of unique gameplay. The game is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment; similar to how Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun innovated new ways to leverage an object in any given situation. Players must solve physical puzzles and challenges by opening portals to maneuvering objects, and themselves, through space.”
From what we’ve seen, Nvidia hasn’t held back when it comes to Portal with RTX and leveraged the full power of its new RTX 40 Series cards. The game has been updated with light that can bounce, reflect, and diffuse realistically across every surface. If you want to watch the entire announcement, you can catch the keynote here:
Source: Nvidia