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Portal with RTX released free on Steam

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Free for owners of the original, Portal with RTX has released on Steam from Lightspeed Studios / NVIDIA.

There's no Native Linux support this time around, unlike with Quake II RTX, but it should still work with Steam Play Proton (NVIDIA told me it works). Valve even added a configuration for it to have NVAPI enabled for Proton by default.

I'm unable to currently test it myself, as the people who run RPMFusion for Fedora have not updated the NVIDIA drivers for Fedora 37 yet from the recent security incident and you need a minimum NVIDIA driver version of 525.60.11. It doesn't need an NVIDIA GPU though, as they say it works on any GPU that supports Vulkan Ray Tracing.

You can see their launch party video below:

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Some of what's been added includes:

  • Full ray tracing - Portal with RTX uses a ray tracing technique known as path tracing or full ray tracing, which unifies all lighting effects, such as shadows, reflections, refractions and more, into a single ray tracing algorithm.
  • NVIDIA DLSS 3– DLSS 3 is a revolutionary breakthrough in neural graphics that massively boosts performance. Powered by fourth generation Tensor Cores and new Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, DLSS 3 uses AI to generate additional high-quality frames with great image quality and responsiveness.
  • NVIDIA Reflex - Improves responsiveness by reducing end to end system latency, enabling players to feel more connected and immersed in the experience.
  • NVIDIA Real Time Denoisers (NRD) is a new spatio-temporal ray tracing denoising library that assists in denoising ray traced images in real-time, with superior performance and quality.
    A new lighting system made possible by NVIDIA RTXDI, NVIDIA ReSTIR GI and the addition of physically based materials/rendering (PBR):
  • NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) enables the addition of countless direct light sources, big and small, each casting light and shadows.
  • NVIDIA Reservoir Spatio Temporal Importance Resampling Global Illumination (ReSTIR GI) enhances indirect light, enabling it to bathe a scene and illuminate dark corners that are not lit directly. And it also works smarter than previous ray-traced global illumination techniques, improving the efficiency of our ray tracing denoiser.
  • Physically based materials/rendering (PBR) – the environment of Portal’s Aperture Labs is upgraded with material properties that emulate real life. This PBR system supports material properties for light emission, roughness, and metallicity that combine with ray tracing to enable lighting effects such as reflections, refraction, translucency, transparency and global illumination.
  • More detailed models – in-game objects have been remodeled to add more detail and increase realism.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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28 comments
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StalePopcorn Dec 8, 2022
Dang, almost makes me wish I had an Nvidia card
d10sfan Dec 8, 2022
It kind of works on amd cards through Proton if you use amdgpu-pro (VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/amd_pro_icd64.json %command%). Runs at 3-4 fps though, in menu and in-game, so not really playable.
Phlebiac Dec 8, 2022
@Liam, you could try the negativo17 repo for Nvidia drivers (I've used it for years); it's got the 525 driver.
https://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/
DefaultX-od Dec 8, 2022
So far, so good. But I can not get fsr and dlss to work at the same time, whenever I change in game resolution it starts to have some weird scaling issues. Also, I can't access steam overlay. The overall performance is good, mostly 50-60fps, but stupid elevator is at 30fps.

important info: To access DLSS and RTX settings, you need to press alt + x


Last edited by DefaultX-od on 9 December 2022 at 11:04 am UTC
peta77 Dec 8, 2022
Manjaro already has the required driver, so I did a short test @ 4K..
Well, it... works... Framerate is at 12-14 most of the time, with some dips down to 8fps, especially when carrying cubes and near portals, and some highs at 17fps (in the elevator, so not that relevant)..
so, at least not worse than quake-rtx, but not really playable either.. wouldn't spent an hour or two with it with that performance...
maybe runs better and is playable at lower resolutions...
pete910 Dec 8, 2022
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Seriously, **** windows only.


**** Nvidia .
Snowdrake Dec 8, 2022
Maybe a stupid question, but how about Steam deck ?
Is this out of the question ? Or should be up to the task ?

EDIT : Pretty dumb actually* Judging by quake 2 rtx performance, this should'nt run well on deck.


Last edited by Snowdrake on 8 December 2022 at 7:37 pm UTC
MrKiasu Dec 8, 2022
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Liam, could you ask nvidia if frame generation is supposed to be available on Linux for 40xx cards? I don't see the option available here, although the game works fine in every other way.
peta77 Dec 8, 2022
Tried with 2K: doesn't work for me in fullscreen.. but with windowed mode i got a stable 35fps... until it deadlocked and crashed... and took the steam client with it...


Last edited by peta77 on 8 December 2022 at 7:04 pm UTC
Terrace Dec 8, 2022
Hmm i thought to make use of DLSS i'd need to go down to a lower resolution (so it has somewhere to scale up to?), but doing that causes the client to become a strange window where where you click isn't where you click in the client. It took me ages to go down-and-right enough pixels to click where the cursor really believes it is to even get back to 3440x1440, and then my FPS was dang terrible with a 3080 card.

pressing Alt-X i did manage to turn a few things down, but apparently the effects weren't going to be fully apparent until a restart, and i really don't have time before I'm about to do some gaming with someone else.

Looking forwards to when people have come up with a few launch options and other tips on protonDB and such to get some sort of middle ground between looking nice and playable.


Last edited by Terrace on 8 December 2022 at 7:24 pm UTC
Xpander Dec 8, 2022
Performance on my RTX 3080 isn't the best. But im actually impressed how good this old game can look. Even with DLSS on Performance on my 1440p screen the image looks really good and it runs 60+ with that setting at least.
DLSS ultra gives me ~30 FPS and Quality ~45 FPS. Not impressed by the performance really, but i guess thats the tax to pay. Looks nice though

Spoiler, click me



Made a gameplay video also: https://youtu.be/tHrBw7LtaeU
poke86 Dec 8, 2022
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It's better than I expected, with the RTX settings as low as they will go and DLSS set to Performance, I get 30-40 FPS @ 1440p with an RTX 2080.
Makes me wonder whether Valve will bother to work on a native GNU/Linux version of their next game.

I do love Portal, though. I'll have to give this a shot tonight.
Philadelphus Dec 9, 2022
I read an article the other day (I forget where now) that the change to more realistic textures and over-all darker lighting change Portal from fairly lighthearted and fun into more of a claustrophobic horror game. Anyone notice anything like that?
mr_daylight Dec 9, 2022
Tried it. Performance is crap. Next.
chickenb00 Dec 9, 2022
OK I gave it a go on: Ryzen 5 5600X + RTX2060 + 16gb Ram on Pop_OS 22.04. For anyone wondering, go into Pop!Shop and Installed tab and click Install on the nvidia-driver-525 option. I used Proton Experimental (proton GE didn't work).In-game reoslution set to 720P, then I quit out and put -windowed -noborder in the launch param to play at 720p windowed from the desktop.
In-Game: You can hit Alt-X to bring up a Reshade menu. You can quick toggle between High and Ultra, but you can also enable the developer options, and then toggle DLSS to Ultra Performance if you want. Anyway, at "DLSS Auto" and Ultra, I get like 22fps in most test chambers. The elevator areas rocket up to 40fps. Turn on DLSS Ultra Performance and I get what feels like 60fps.
This is a curiosity, a demo. IMO it doesn't show off raytracing that well because most rooms are statically-lit. It's nice that I didn't have to dip into my bios and load Windows to try this out, however!
M@GOid Dec 9, 2022
It is being review bombed on Steam. I sure will do my part to help this Nvidia marketing tool to sell 1600 dollar cards...
Ehvis Dec 9, 2022
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Gave it a quick try. At default settings on a resolution of 3440x1440 it gave me about 15 fps with my 2080 Ti. The only setting that affected the fps in a significant way was the amount of DLSS with "Ultra performance" getting it up to about 50 ish. Unfortunately that produces a lot of edge artefacts and ghosting. One MAJOR flaw is that GSYNC refuses to work in this, so I got some nice tearing as a bonus. All in all, not worth it for actual playing.
peta77 Dec 9, 2022
I can't even get the game to run for more than two minutes on my Windows PC. Fully updated drivers and everything. I've beaten the game so many times now that I just don't really care to deal with it.

So it's time to finally dump your Windows (haven't used mine in a year or so). I only had stability problems on Linux running it in windowed mode at reduced resolution. And that still meant at least 5 (or rather 10) minutes of playtime.

Need another motivation? Remember this: only burglars / thiefs use windows.


Last edited by peta77 on 9 December 2022 at 7:23 pm UTC
Purple Library Guy Dec 9, 2022
I'll never stop using Windows as my main. Steam Deck and running Unraid on my servers is the closest I will get to using Linux.
Huh. I suppose you're the first example of something we may see more of in the future: Someone hanging here at Gaming on Linux because they use a Steam Deck, even though desktop-wise they're purely a Windows person.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 9 December 2022 at 8:25 pm UTC
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