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:
Direct Link
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.
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
I do love Portal, though. I'll have to give this a shot tonight.
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!
Quoting: GuestI 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
Quoting: GuestI'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
See more from me