Ray tracing coming to Portal this November
Hotter than Chell.
Nvidia is releasing Portal with RTX, which will see the game's graphics reimagined "with full ray tracing and entirely new art evocative of the original."
In a detailed blog post, Nvidia stated that "full ray tracing" will mean every level will be transformed. Light will now bounce around the settings, and "be affected by the scene's geometry and materials". Meanwhile, where shadows are being cast, these will be "pixel perfect".
"Portal's unique selling point is the ability to take anything through a portal, and see through them, something that hadn't been done before its release," Nvidia elaborated. "With ray tracing, light can pass through portals, too. Even the light from the moving High Energy Pellets will cast through portals, causing shadows to shift in step." You can see a little preview of Portal with RTX below.
The team behind this new look Portal is Nvidia's inhouse Lightspeed Studios. The company has used its experience working on both Minecraft and Quake 2 for this new build, but in addition it has also used a new tool known as the Nvidia RTX Remix modding platform.
Nvidia explained that, with this tool in play, "the game runs in the background and [it replaces] the old rendering APIs and systems with RTX Remix's 64-bit Vulkan renderer." This means that it will enable "the addition of ray-tracing to classic games and it all updates in real-time as lights and objects move".
Portal with RTX is coming this November, pitched as a 'DLC' for the Steam version of the game, where you can wishlist it now. In addition to this, Nvidia has announced that it will be releasing its modding tool for free, allowing users to "add ray tracing with just a few clicks" as well as providing "modders the tools to make ambitious remasters, even for games that were previously unmoddable."