Portal with RTX is a lot more than a fancy mod created to showcase the latest in gaming hardware. It also marks the debut of a new technology called RTX Remix. - a fascinating tool for creators that can be used to mod just about any game.

Powered by NVIDIA’s Omniverse, RTX hardware, and AI, it can effectively take any scene from a DirectX 8 or DirectX 9 rendered game, and provide access to replace assets, update models, use AI to enhance visuals, and even add real-time ray-tracing with relative ease.

“RTX Remix was really understated in how we launched it,” NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang says about RTX Remix. “Let me relaunch it. I believe the next generation of games is about user-generated content. I believe that it's about user-generated worlds that are heavily modified from the original creation. All of these amazing games started out their lives as mods for a good reason. Nine out of the ten most popular games today started out as mods for a good reason. And the reason for that is that there's so much creativity around the world. Everybody's a creator.”

Our Full RTX Remix Breakdown with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Portal with RTX is not only a mod but in many ways, it remakes Valve's iconic puzzle game thanks to its stunning use of real-time ray-tracing. Like Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX before it, it presents a fully path-traced version of the game - and one that shines with DLSS 3.

A snippet.

Portal with RTX presents a fully ray-traced version of Portal, to the point where the ray-traced light show beams through the various portals you play with. Every light you see is path-traced, and the results are pretty incredible. The glow of portals, the translucent buttons, the transparent reflections. The reflections within reflections within portals. So good.

Of course, you’ll need a GeForce RTX 30 Series or 40 series GPU to play Portal with RTX as intended - with some DLSS magic of course. With a GeForce RTX 4090 and the added bonus of DLSS 3’s Frame Generation, you can push the resolution to 4K with a frame-rate well above 60 fps. A massive step up from how we experienced Portal back in the day on a PC or Xbox 360.

Our Full Portal with RTX Review

Portal with RTX brings stunning real-time ray-tracing to Valve’s classic, all without impacting how the original game felt to play. Make no mistake about it, this is cutting-edge stuff to the point that light travels through the portals you create and impacts the surrounding environments using the latest in RTX technologies.

Here’s a look at the first 30 minutes of Portal with RTX captured on a GeForce RTX 4090. A quick note: to capture this in 4K using a capture card DLSS 3’s Frame Generation had to be disabled. This means playing through Portal with RTX, as depicted in my full review, was done so without any performance issues or hitches.

Portal with RTX is a free DLC for all Portal owners developed by NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios. Experience the critically acclaimed and award-winning Portal reimagined with ray tracing.

Every frame of gameplay is upgraded with stunning full ray tracing, new, hand-crafted hi-res physically based textures, and new enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals, all in stunning 4K. In Portal with RTX, full ray tracing transforms each level, enabling light to bounce and be affected by the scene’s geometry and materials. Every light is ray-traced and casts shadows, global illumination indirect lighting naturally illuminates and darkens rooms, volumetric ray-traced lighting scatters through fog and smoke, and shadows are pixel-perfect.

Portal with RTX is out on December 9.