Portal with RTX Review - No optimization included in the deal
We talk (and show) about the new DLC online games from the studio Friv2Online that adds support for ray tracing to the original Portal.
The announcement of Portal with RTX took place simultaneously with the premiere of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000 series graphics cards and NVIDIA DLSS 3.0 AI scaling technology . This game (more specifically, an add-on available to owners of the original for free) adds full ray tracing support to Portal , as well as improves lighting effects, textures, and game models.
The project was not developed by Valve , but by Lightspeed, which created the port using the NVIDIA RTX Remix modding tools, which NVIDIA says can bring ray tracing to games in just a few clicks.
The add-on page appeared on Steam shortly after the announcement, and acquaintance with it was not encouraging: the system requirements of Portal with RTX inspired serious concerns about the speed of the game. The minimum requirements are an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card , and the flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 is required for ultra-graphics settings.
As it turned out, the information from the game page is quite true: on a PC with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 on board, the pumped Portal does not produce stable 60 frames per second at 1440p resolution, on the contrary, fps often drops below the minimum comfortable 30 fps, while the video card is loaded at 100% and makes noise with fans, trying to cool the heated graphics chip.
And at first it even seems that such a frame rate is not entirely justified, because in the starting scenes Portal with RTX looks like Portal 2 in the picture. Everything changes a little later, when energy balls appear in the tests, and there are more reflective surfaces at the levels. I must say that the RTX version of the game looks quite impressive: it has beautiful lighting, realistic reflections and nice imitation of various surfaces.
For comparison, we suggest looking at footage from the original game and comparing them with screenshots of the RTX remaster .
However, there are many questions about the performance of the game. It can work great in "heavy", full of effects scenes, or it can start to slow down when you look at the wall. Or even spontaneously close, for example, when you exit the menu or minimize the application. Most likely, the developers have not fully polished the project, and for a comfortable passage you will have to wait for the release of a couple of patches.
However, despite these problems, we still have the same classic Portal. The magic works: once you enter the game to look at the "beams", you most likely won't emerge from it until you've dealt with GLaDOS. If you have long wanted to replay the cult puzzle , and at the same time test a brand new video card, this is a great reason.
