Ray Traced Portal is released on December 8th

In connection with Nvidia’s unveiling of the Geforce RTX 4000 series, it has been disclosed that Portal, which was initially released in 2007, will receive an appropriate graphics upgrade. The update comes in the form of a free add-on that, among other things, improves the game’s lighting and adds improved models and textures.

In Portal with RTX, full ray tracing transforms each level, allowing light to bounce and be affected by the geometry and materials of the scene. Every light is ray-traced and casts shadows, Global Illumination indirect lighting naturally brightens and darkens rooms, ray-traced volumetric lighting scatters through mist and smoke, and shadows are pixel perfect. Portal with RTX is compatible with all ray-tracing capable GPUs.

With Portal with RTX follows ray tracing in its essence, with both global illumination and the so-called volumetric ray tracing. With the graphical improvements come unsurprisingly higher demands on the user’s computer, which judging by the levels are many times more demanding than the original 15-year-old version.

For older 2007 Portals, you can get by, for example, with a piece of Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 and a graphics card in the style of Geforce FX 5500 or Radeon 9500, combined with 2GB of main memory. For Portal with RTX, the second and lowest recommended sandwiches land instead on Intel Core i7-6700 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 on the processor side, accompanied by at least a Geforce RTX 3060.

To pull all the gears, the Core i7-12700K or Ryzen 9 5900 applies, along with the fresh RTX 4080. Also, 32GB of primary memory and upscaling with DLSS 3 are recommended. A real step forward, to say the least . Portal with RTX will be available via Steam starting December 8th. The add-on is free, as long as you already own Portal.