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'Portal' will get ray tracing to show off NVIDIA's 4000-series GPUs

The realistic lighting is... not a lie?

NVIDIA

Portal 3 may never happen, but at least we've got a new way to experience the original teleporting puzzle shooter. Today during his GTC keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced Portal with RTX, a mod that adds support for real-time ray tracing and DLSS 3. Judging from the the short trailer, it looks like the Portal we all know and love, except now the lighting around portals bleeds into their surroundings, and just about every surface is deliciously reflective.

Similar to what we saw with Minecraft RTX, Portal's ray tracing mod adds a tremendous amount of depth to a very familiar game. And thanks to DLSS 3, the latest version of NVIDIA's super sampling technology, it also performs smoothly with plenty of RTX bells and whistles turned on. This footage likely came from the obscenely powerful RTX 4090, but it'll be interesting to see how well Portal with RTX performs on NVIDIA's older 2000-series cards. Current Portal owners will be able to play the RTX mod in November.

NVIDIA RTX Remix
NVIDIA

Huang says the company developed the RTX mod inside of its Omniverse environment. To take that concept further, NVIDIA is also launching RTX Remix, an application that will let you capture existing game scenes and tweak their objects and environments with high resolution textures and realistic lighting. The company's AI tools can automatically give materials "physically accurate" properties—a ceiling in Morrowind, for example, becomes reflective after going through RTX Remix. You'll be able to export remixed scenes as mods, and other players will be able to play them through the RTX renderer.