Highlights
- Portal: Prelude, the popular mod for Portal, has been remastered with full ray tracing, DLSS 3, Nvidia Reflex, and Nvidia RTX IO for improved visuals and gameplay.
- Nvidia released Portal with RTX last December, updating the graphics of the 16-year-old game to be more in line with modern ray-traced titles.
- The remastered version, Portal: Prelude RTX, features new upgraded materials, assets, voice acting, and gameplay improvements, along with the debut of Nvidia's new tech, RTX IO, which improves load times and reduces CPU utilization.
Portal: Prelude, the most popular community-created mod for the classic award-winning game Portal, has got the RTX Remix treatment. Nvidia has announced that the remaster for the game will now feature full ray tracing, DLSS 3, Nvidia Reflex, and the new Nvidia RTX IO, along with a few other material and asset improvements. Portal: Prelude RTX is available for download via Steam for free.
Last December, Nvidia released Portal with RTX which was a free DLC for Portal owners, and it added full ray tracing, new hi-res physically based textures, and enhanced high-poly models to the game that was released almost 16 years ago. It gave the game a new life by updating the graphics to be more in line with modern ray-traced titles. The RTX implementation was done using Nvidia RTX Remix which is a free, yet to be released, modding platform that allows developers and modders to create upgrades for classic games.
Nvidia has now released Portal: Prelude RTX which was also developed using RTX Remix tool. For those unaware, Portal: Prelude is an unofficial prequel to Portal that brings an 8-10 hour new campaign with 19 new test chambers, a fully voiced story with NPCs, and advanced gameplay mechanics. It was created by Nicolas “NykO18” Grevet and others, and it became the highest-rated Portal mod, #3 overall Player’s Choice mod of 2008, and won the 2008 Portal ModDB. In 2011, Valve released the sequel called Portal 2 which became another beloved entry in the franchise.
Portal: Prelude RTX is a remaster of the original mod/game with updated visuals and lighting tech. It now features full ray tracing or path tracing, DLSS 3, Nvidia Reflex, as well as Nvidia RTX IO – more on that later. Furthermore, Nvidia says that hundreds of new upgraded materials and assets from David “Kralich” Driver-Gomm and Valerios “Fearell_Val” Tsoumpas have been added to the game. There is new voice acting by Jack “Amicus” McDade and Colin “SordidSpectacle” Zachariasen, as well as gameplay improvements from Nicolas.
Nvidia will be debuting its new tech called RTX IO with Portal: Prelude RTX. It is a GPU-based loading and game asset decompression that is meant to improve load times and lower CPU utilization. The company says RTX IO enables faster texture load time which minimizes asset pop-in. It also reduces the texture package install size by 44% which means nearly 32GB of 4K textures will only take up 18GB of storage space without losing detail. This technology will also be present in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart which is launching on July 26.