Portal Gets DLC Content With RTX Remix Overhaul
According to Nvidia, their RTX Remix platform allows users to integrate ray tracing into older titles with just a few clicks of a mouse button. This allows modders the necessary tools to make remasters of their own, especially for games that previously proved to be unmoddable. To demonstrate the capabilities of these incredible new GPUs, we’re releasing Portal with RTX, which reimagines the classic game’s graphics with full ray tracing and entirely new art evocative of the original. Portal with RTX will be free for existing Portal owners. – Nvidia
It was announced during Geforce Beyond that the mod would be free in November to those that already own Portal on Windows PC. Called NVIDIA RTX Remix, this ingenious modding platform can add ray tracing with just a few clicks, and gives modders the tools to make ambitious remasters, even for games that were previously unmoddable. Simply press a hotkey to import a game, use AI to enhance materials, build custom assets using Omniverse, and export an RTX Mod complete with ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3, and NVIDIA Reflex. RTX Remix elevates modding to a whole new level. – Nvidia But that’s not all. Nvidia has gone far and beyond to create unique assets of their own for Portal, which they claim are in the same spirits as Valve’s original work. With RTX Remix, the game runs in the background and we replace the old rendering APIs and systems with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This enables the addition of ray-tracing to classic games and it all updates in real-time as lights and objects move. Light can be cast from behind the player, or from another room, and in Portal with RTX, light even travels through portals. Glass refracts light, surfaces reflect detail based on their glossiness, and reflections can be cast into the scene from behind the player, objects can self-reflect, and indirect light from off-screen illuminates and affects what you see. To take full advantage of ray tracing, your game assets need to have physically based properties, and ideally be geometrically detailed, too. Without physically based rendering (PBR) materials, light reacts identically on all surfaces. By specifying the attributes of each material and their reflectivity, light bounces, reflects, diffuses and dissipates realistically across each texture. – Nvidia Portal is a puzzle game that originally debuted as a part of Valve’s The Orange Box. Players get to navigate environments by opening and closing portals they can walk through. To maximize the benefit of upgraded materials and surfaces, our team remade many of Portal’s models. Silhouettes were retained to avoid changing their appearance, but in every other respect models were updated, increasing polygon counts and adding geometric detail, allowing them to interact flawlessly with ray tracing, and to look appropriately detailed alongside the game-changing ray-raced effects. A continually-seen example is on the Portal gun: its plastics react differently, and the cylinder is upgraded with ray-traced glass, with accurate fresnel properties, showing accurate real-time reflections that bend and distort across the glass as you attempt to escape from the test facility. Even decals, such as bullet holes, blood splatters and scorch marks, have been upgraded with PBR properties. Remix’s AI texture tools transform the decals to accurately blend with the upgraded scenery, and interact naturally with ray tracing. – Nvidia The game featured a dark but humorous narrative as players cleared puzzles and navigated their way through the mysterious Aperature Science Laboratories. During the Stream, Nvidia also revealed their next generation of graphics cards, headlined by their Flagship Nvidia RTX 4090, for which the classic title with the RTX Remix integration serves as a demonstration of new technologies and features added into the mix. Portal is available for the Xbox 360, PS3, Mac OSX, Linux, Android, Nintendo Switch and Windows PC, but Portal’s RTX Remix Update is exclusive for PCs featuring Nvidia RTX GPUs. So, what do you think of the classic Portal getting a refresh with the upcoming RTX Remix DLC set for November? Let us know in the comments below. We upload daily on Appuals, so stay tuned for more. Till then, see you later and goodbye!
