Ray Tracing is coming to Portal in November

Nvidia is launching Portal with RTX, which will see the game’s graphics reimagined “with full ray tracing and all-new art evoking the original.”

In a detailed blog post, Nvidia said “full ray tracing” would mean every level would be transformed. Light will now bounce around the parameters and “be affected by scene geometry and materials”. Meanwhile, where the shadows are cast, they will be “pixel perfect”.

“Portal’s unique selling point is the ability to pass anything through a portal and see through them, something that hadn’t been done before release,” Nvidia explained. “With ray tracing, light can also pass through portals. Even light from moving high-energy pellets will be projected through portals, causing shadows to move step by step.” You can see a small preview of Portal with RTX below.

The team behind this new portal is Nvidia’s in-house Lightspeed Studios. The company used its experience working on Minecraft and Quake 2 for this new version, but in addition, it also used a new tool known as the Nvidia RTX Remix modding platform.

Nvidia explained that with this in-game tool, “the game runs in the background and [it replaces] legacy APIs and rendering systems with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer.” This means it will enable “the addition of ray-tracing to classic games and all real-time updates as and when as lights and objects move”.

Portal with RTX is coming in November, billed as a “DLC” for the Steam version of the game, where you can list it now. On top of that, Nvidia has announced that it will release its modding tool for free, allowing users “to add ray tracing with just a few clicks” as well as providing “modders with the tools to create ambitious remasters, even for games that were previously impossible to mod.”