The Portal with RTX release date has been set for next week. Chell's journey through the Aperture Science Enrichment Center is getting all-new sparkly lighting and visuals on December 8th, so get your portal gun ready and prepare to once again run GLaDOS' sadistic gauntlet.
Ray tracing is being added to all kinds of classic and modern games, either through user mods or official updates. Portal with RTX is a piece of DLC that you can get for free if you own Portal, and it reimagines "every frame" of the original puzzle classic with full ray tracing and new hand-crafted textures.
In essence, it looks like Portal pushed through a lens of ultra-realism. The textures are sharper and shinier, the lighting is naturally much more realistic, and the metal surfaces are approximately one hundred percent more light-reflective (no, that's not a scientific measure). You can see Portal with RTX in action right here courtesy of Nvidia.
The people behind this Portal RTX rework are Lightspeed Studios, whose name you might recognize if you played the Quake 2 RTX remaster a few years ago. One could argue Quake 2 was a game much more in need of prettying up than Portal, but it's hard to deny that Lightspeed's new version of Valve's claustrophobic puzzler looks pretty darn snazzy.
Naturally, if you want to play Portal with RTX, you're going to need a ray-tracing-compatible graphics card and a pretty powerful gaming PC as well. Thankfully, the game will be fully compatible with DLSS, so you can flick that switch to improve performance if your system is flagging a little.
Handily, according to the original Portal with RTX announcement, the game is also being released alongside a tool that will "give the RTX treatment to other classic games". Nvidia RTX Remix is a modding platform that lets you add ray tracing to other games, then easily export a mod that lets other players play that game with ray tracing enabled.
Portal with RTX will be available via Steam on December 8th. You'll need to own a copy of the original Portal in order to play it, but honestly, if you haven't already played Portal at this point, you should already know how much you're missing out.
