Interestingly, Gabe Newell (when developing Portal in 1989) wanted to add an extremely detailed model of himself into the game waving and doing a backflip. Unfortunately it wasn't possible back in the 80's but I'm really thankful he was added to Portal RTX.
Crazy how far Portal came from the original 2D concept on the NES. One of those rare examples of a game in development for over a decade that comes out great.
That idea was scrapped in favor of a photorealistic, three-dimensional cake that we see in the end of the game, honouring the founder of Valve, John Valve.
the technology behind this (RTX Remix) is actual black magic! It hijacks the DirectX render pipeline and splices in your own assets over existing assets; you could for example tell it to swap out that coffee cup asset for a teapot asset *and that actually works* (and you can then make a mod out of that and send it to others) Oh and its completely independent of the game itself meaning this allows modding the graphics of any game ever released that can render with DirectX 9 (currently)
It's going to be really interesting to bring this kind of tech into the half life 2 maps, given how they run on the same engine and share models and textures between the games
Nvidia is releasing some tools that will make it possible to do ray tracing and even asset swapping in basically any game. You're going to see the modding community blow up making these kinds of remakes and I'm sure half life 2 will be part of that. Go look up the demo they did of morrowind and it's unbelievable. It will swap models on the fly so you can take the old low poly models and replace them with high polygon models and make the game look almost new
@@blunderingfool Imagine that on every game made in D9. Sure, Morrowind already have that, but how about Half Life 2? Halo? GTA VC? Star Wars Old Republic, Splinter, AC2, and a whole lot more of D9 games, added with RTX and DLSS.
@@AdrianRojasF There are points that still stand, the tile textures are designed completely differently and don't have the same grunge that the originals do, some really rusted metals look like they got a recent clean, the padding on the elevators isn't stained, the lights are all different brightness from the originals, and the pellets still emit way too much light. It's not RTX that's the issue here, I'm happy about the RTX but the new textures aren't great. The glass on the opening room looks great though but its still too clear. I'm hoping we get some more faithful textures in the future, either from nvidia or the community.
@@Synergiance I think with all these new tools there will be lots of half-assed re-releases coming from AAA companies. But also we'll see so much -incredible- stuff from the community, as always.
@@AdrianRojasF if companies will use remix to create half-assed re-releases then modders will use exact same tool to create better versions and re-release them for free companies will be able to poorly recreate graphics in their older games and ask money for it, sure (actually they're able to do that at any given time, but whatever), but will anybody pay for it if somewhere in the world there will be a group of teenagers with too much free time, who will do that better and for free? doubt it. modders are already pretty much remastering plenty of games, and without any fancy nvidia technologies too, if game studios want me to pay for same thing, then they MUST do it better
Yeah Portal is a pretty good candidate for this sort of 'mod'. Portal already had very clean, crisp and "realistic" designs and graphics, so this mod just enhances it IMO. But it def doesn't work in all games, games with heavily stylised looks where the creators intentionally made their game look unrealistic suffer a bit from the super enhanced lighting. Like the Morrowind example feels weird to me, like it loses a lot of Morrowind's visual identity in the process (although Morrowind is almost unbearably ugly in 2022, at least without heavy nostalgia, so there's a balance). In contrast, I think this tech would make a big difference to Skyrim or Oblivion, which went for more realistic looks than earlier games
@@helplmchoking but it doesnt enhance it - it strips the beauty of the og game all the panels are stark white no imperfections on them anymore, and the portals look horrible
The room near the end that "isn't lit" is actually a room you enter a couple minutes later in that same map. (spoilers ahead) when you go through the pipe you end up in a test chamber which can be seen behind the glass
@@notalostnumber8660 more lighting sources means more calculations so it might be better to have less lights on at a time until they’re in view of the player (might be wrong though)
@@SnickerXYZ That screams "we didn't actually optimize anything at all". Which is... accurate considering that most of the performance loss isn't even in the raytracing bits.
networked titles send position and orientation over network... ...write this down to a file - along with a time-stamp - you can play it back. This was an extremely common feature in the old days. Quake, Halflife, etc.
I personally don't like some of the tech demoey looking assets like the cubes, but I mean shoot, it's a tech demo! I'll be happy to try the game out when it's publicly out.
And of course there will probably be modders making more faithful versions of some of these assets pretty quickly, so it shouldn't be too hard to touch up
This. It is tech demoey FIRST and a game second. Yes there's a lot that has been improved but at the same the over the top pro-RTX changes feels like when 3d gimmicks were pushed in movies so there were things being thrown at the camera constantly, and the asset changes make it feel disjointed and completely changing the feel of the game. Where in the original the static light was often very deliberate now it's all 'oooo RTX, look at the pretty lights'. The light being used as subtle progress hints is also something that's been used for decades now and that is NOT being replicated from what I've seen so far. Overall it just feels... amateurish. Like some mods that make the game 'better' by people that do not grasp the idea of design consistency. @harbingerdawn Ultimately this. Modding meritocracy will fix it.
In fairness, the weird cubes being shown off in this video are secret settings you have to go out of your way to enable, by default they just look like the originals.
I think my biggest issue is just that it looks so much darker. Walls that used to read to me as white now look gray, and I'm just not the biggest fan of that.
Yeah, it's lost the sterile laboratory feel of the game which is part of what made it stand out. GLADoS isn't some omniscient quasi evil AI, she is a middle manager of a big box store and you're an employee sent to get some stock item.
Imo that should be pretty easy to fix if you have a level designer co-operate. Even though original portal looks more “bland” in comparison, each texture, wall, and model has a specific purpose for being what it is, where it is, and the way it is. Someone looking at the game from a player’s perspective or even the perspective of someone who hasn’t played it before is likely not going to be able to know those purposes and therefore risks making changes that directly conflict with the original design intentions.
You could just load the HL2 maps into Portal since they share like literally every asset. There wouldn't be any updated textures or models but you'll still get lighting raytracing, and the combine energy balls I guess.
The first thing I noticed was the cleanness, it isn't something that bothers me but it's noticeable and I would prefer I little more dirt in the walls nevertheless that stile is great in portal 1
Yeah, I noticed that too. The original Portal has a great atmosphere, and a lot of that is down to the dirty/disused feel that the facility has, and how that contrasts with the sterile white aesthetic. It looks like they tried to make the remake closer to the brand-new clean chambers from Portal 2. Can't really complain too much though, it seems like this is pretty much a tech demo with Valve's approval rather than an official remaster or anything like that.
While grunge and dirt is important to photorealism and different art styles, it was often cranked up to 11 in 360 era games to compensate for the lackluster lighting by baking in a ton of high contrast detail to the textures. Modern remasters will almost always look different because of this. That being said, they may have gone to the complete other end of the spectrum this time and a bit more dirt wouldn't hurt.
I think they're using different textures to more align with the story. At 4:12 you can see "dirtier" wall tile textures in the areas behind the testing chambers. I think it meshes with the story really well. In Portal 2, you can clearly see progressively cleaner surfaces as GLaDOS cleans up Aperture after she is reactivated, and I think this portrays that: GLaDOS is keeping the test chambers clean, but she can't "see" behind the scenes so those areas are a little dirtier.
It uses DXVK to translate the game into Vulcan so it can access all the fancy Vulcan ray tracing APIs. It's the same project that gives CSGO vulcan support and is the reason dx 9/10/11 games run so well on Steam Deck, I'm surprised you didn't mention it.
Does that mean with DXVK ye can translate other games too? meaning dx10 & dx11 , why wouldnt they mention this if it was possible. They only said you can only import games with dx8 or dx9 with "fixed pipeline" whatever that means. If it uses DXVK why cant they translate newer games(maybe they would be to intense for this RTXDI (i think) which they call path tracing
@@DarkoP9.13 i'm not sure how relevant usage of dxvk is to game compatibiliy. It sounds like the core idea behind rtx remix is presenting a fixed-function interface, and internally using their own fancy raytracing shaders. Stuff that uses the fixed function interface then gets magically raytraced. Games that don't use the fixed function interface use... well, shaders, which can do whatever they want, and they can (and do) handle, say, lighting, in many different ways. This is no longer a single interface for you to work with, but effectively a different interface for every game, or even every material. Thus, they don't target those games.
@@DarkoP9.13 One of the slides in Nvidia's presentation was "RTX Remix Runtime: The Machinery Behind the Magic" and DXVK is listed for "D3D9 -> Vulkan Conversion". They didn't mention how D3D8 will work, my guess is maybe they're using dx8to9 + DXVK so DX8 -> DX9 -> Vulkan. That or Nvidia are the one's commissioning the D8VK project that popped up on Github recently.
I'm hoping we can add ancient directX. So I can run this old game that's close to my heart: Little Big Adventure 2 I think seeing that Ray traced would break my brain. That was dx6, IIRC, which didn't even have translucency, so no actual see-through windows.
The difficult part for me is that, if no comparison was made, I would find most things quite normal. Things seemed way prettier when I played portal for the first time. It's kinda like mount and blade: in my head, the graphics always looked like bannerlord for all versions.
I think it’s really cool, but I’m also pretty upset that they didn’t bother remaking the old baked lightmaps for things like windows. The rooms seem so much more bland without the window lighting
This was also my thoughts. I get that it's a tech demo, but lighting was used to quite literally highlight certain parts of puzzles, feel of the level, etc, and a simple replacement doesn't replicate the original intent. I'll enjoy it for what it is, though.
They probably could have, but the lighting in OG portal is ridiculously unrealistic, the walls are all white, the entire room is white. That shit is going to reflect like hell, so the light wouldn't be nearly as concentrated. The only way to get similar light would be to have the light come exclusively from the window, and it'd need to be fairly dim.
3:11 I think ossys video was less about the betrayal of the games art style but more about the games visual direction and how it influences gameplay. or at the very least thats what I had gathered from it.
crazy how it doesn't look too different on its own, might just be my brain but Portal RTX is just how the original Portal looking in my head. side-by-side, its no contest
@@deepwebwhirlpool It is a big reason i don't go back and replay some of my favorite games. I enjoy the version of it in my head from when i was a kid and don't want to ruin it.
2:04 i know that this is kinda late, but as portal is based on the source engine, you should be able to use getpos and set pos to have 100% identical footage (just with and without raytracing), if you sync it to the right keyframe (iE the portalgun firing). maybe that helps for future videos :) otherwise great video as always :)
I think what he meant was like, since there was no way to disable raytracing he couldn't do raytracing comparisons with the new materials, so instead he had to compare the raytraced new portal w/ old materials against the old/og portal
@@Pluvillion ; That's exactly what he did. You see how sometimes the cube "lags" behind mouse movements? that's because Phillip recorded a demo and is playing it back. Also how the jumping at the beginning of the game looked off, that's a telltale sign of being a demo
11:25 ... I never realised how much seeing two *reflections* of a portal would break my brain - I can't even imagine the tech wizardry needed to pull this off either. Mind blowing!
Damn, this is such a perfect game to do raytracing on. When someone did it with Quake 2 it was like "oh, that's some pretty neat lighting I guess" but it just didn't do all that much for imo. But here with the clinical setting and art direction of Portal it REALLY shines. Absolutely gorgeous.
Didn't know content creators would get early access, good because I was really curious how it would look like outside the promotional content nvidia has released so far.. Still, I'll play it and enjoy the RTX stuff, definitely. People complain too much like if this version was to replace the original one and ruin forever the art style lol Lastly, the RTX Remix thing is what has brought my attention when they announced it in September, I hope they'll release it soon so I can mess up with it in other older titles
@@Ferdam Can't wait to see ray-traced Bioshock the most! If Nvidia-remix truly uses AI to create screen-based accurate materials - An underwater art-deco city is gonna look so beautiful... This game is as old as first Portal, so I'm sure Nvidia Remix supports it
Honestly, I'm skeptical about how well this will actually work in practice. I expect this to run into quite a bit of issues that may or may not have a workaround for them without having to touch the original renderer in some way or another. I guess we'll see in the future if this really is the silver bullet we've all been hoping for.
It's a courtesy and shows respect for the viewer. A good story is still a good story 15 years later, there's no justification in spoiling it for anyone who hasn't heard it yet
"So we can expect modders in the community to make their own raytraced versions of older games very soon." Gordon Freeman picking up his shiny, raytraced crowbar: "Ah, shit. Here we go again."
Portal is meant to have these rooms that are so high tech and futuristic looking that there's just ambient light everywhere. No shadows or anything. It is meant to be this sanitized environment. This is a very very bad reimagining of it. Some parts make sense, and maybe it would have been better to do this to Portal 2 than the original, but the rooms are all ruined with this whole "Omg look me, I can add way too much to something meant to be subtle" thing they've got going on.
While we have two conversations at hand (portal rtx and the technology itself) I think the technology is fascinating. While no doubt it requires some tinkering first, this can be a neat addition to old games that may be forgotten by the devs themselves or are not interested in such graphical updates. I wonder how such implementation can work with emulators (I hate to pull the emulator card but it'll be necessary for the conversation) some old titles certainly will never see such a graphical remake ever so this could be the next big thing. If people can make High resolution texture packs no doubt some support can come off from it. Whichever scenario it'll be interesting to look forward to.
It's weird, all of the dirtyness and brutalism from the old portal was basically removed for no apparent reason? the ligthing looks impressive but the new materials look extremely generic and just look worse to me
I found your channel yesterday after finishing Half Life 2 for the first time (despite having played chapter 1-2 a million times as a kid) and Im so glad I did. Your Half-Life summary videos are awesome and to-the-point.
My first thought was half life 2 when you mentioned how it’s a platform that did the Ray tracing. I’d honestly even be prepared to drop like 20 bucks on it
Just two days before its going to be released, can't wait to try it out with my raytracing graphics card. I kinda like the futuristic design but something tells me that it doesn't fit. Well, it will give me a reason to replay Portal again.
After playing it I agree with you, while some assets feel a little loud like the cubes, the game feels very natural and looks and feels like Portal unlike videos of it. The energy ball's light is straight out of r/simulated, beautiful
that video was based on the first trailer. since then, a lot has been improved. when I saw the reveal trailer, I really disliked the art direction, but I have no issues with the released version.
Nvidia listened and fixed the portals instead of dark blue/orange on the inner outline and light blue/orange on the outer outline they fixed it to be light at the bottom then fade darker at the top
i personally really love the new elevator, especially how they redid the padded panels. actually feels like aperature intended the test subjects to already be going through mental distress.
the assets in the base game are actually basically the same resolution as here, the view with original assets option actually uses the worst, directx 8 cut down assets so its not a good comparison
Interesting, I noticed a lot of DLSS 3 artifacts in this video, even watching it at 2.2x speed they were still quite noticeable. I wonder why shadowplay even records these when you have 60 perfectly fine non-artifacted frames per second to use anyway.
Considering that Source already used baked raytracing, I wonder how the calculations for the environmental lighting differ. Since the two look so drastically different.
I just realized they made a bit of a joke in portal 2 about how long it took them between games. 5 years. 5 years is less than average for big titles these days. takes 4x as long because the asset textures are 4x the size.
Since you can mount Half life 2 on top of Portal ( and therefor Portal RTX ), you should technically be able to use this technology with half life 2 too without really doing anything with the software itself. would be cool if you could test it out!
I prefer the original personaly. The Portal world is supposed to look dirty, simplistic, and futuristic. You can argue the simplisticness was entirely because of limitation at the time, so I’ll ignore that RTX version majorly screws that up. RTX nails the futuristic look, but tgey made everything squeaky clean.
So portal was one of the first FPS (esque) games I ever played. Stuck with integrated graphics from an ancient Phenom II processor. The way Portal RTX looks now is what normal Portal looked like to me when I first played it. PS2 titles were what I was used to, so that mediocre graphical leap might as well have been the Grand Canyon. It was immaculate, spectacular, and all mine. I really like how ValvE is still such a welcoming company amongst a sea of those who aren't. Even if it is Nvidia, a giant hardware and media conglomerate, it's still a welcome project. So again, thanks ValvE.
This is weird, it's recognizable but it doesn't feel the same. I guess it's proof that there's something about Source graphics which really lends to the atmosphere of the game.
The whole "Portal RTX ruins the OG's art direction" debate doesn't holds much water when you consider that 1) It's not a replacement for the original as it can still be played directly from Steam 2) It's free for all Portal owners on Steam 3) Even in the RTX version you can play with the original assets It's not like most remasters where the original gets delisted or isn't well preserverd to begin with and the remastered version with more controversially subjective changes is the only way to access to a game you already played but have to pay again
whether it ruins the art direction or not, it has nothing to do with the availability of the RTX or original version. so that's a wrong point. Just the third one makes sense for what are you trying to demonstrate.
@@MrVicho13 I'm talking about stuff like the GTA trilogy being removed from Steam (and still not being back on Steam) to push a much worse product at full price (personally I always thought "Definitive Edition" looked like ass from the reveal, most people seemed fine with it until they saw how broken the game was) Portal RTX doesn't tries to erase the original at any level, so if I don't like how it look I can always ignore its existence, it's not like I have a raytracing-capable GPU anyways lol (an it doesn't even enforces to own one to still play the original)
honestly it looks like they toned down and fixed a number of the issues from when ozzy's video was released. i also quite disliked the look in the reveal, but the state its in as of your gameplay looks much better, especially since theres an option to play with the original assets/textures. i still wish they just used the portal 2 design for the cube, though.
Idk about this one... It can look great at times but then you see a fuzzy moving shadow or smeary moving reflection and it completely breaks the immersion. I had the same impressions with Minecraft RTX. Looks great in screenshots and slow pans but when you actually play the game you notice the many temporal artifacts.
RTX remix works in a similar way to Mario 3D All-stars. Although Mario 3D All-stars uses emulation, all HD textures are swapped by Lua scripts before rendering the game
I'm personally not a fan of the redesigned companion cube and translucent buttons, but otherwise this looks pretty incredible. I don't have the hardware for it, but it's neat.
Honestly can't wrap my head around people being upset at this game for existing? Portal is ancient, everyone's played it, its like an hour long game for most. This is really just a tech demo, and shows off RTX really amazingly when compared to the old game.
im sure portal rtx had a lot of tweaks but if rtx remix does even 25% of what it claims it can do, we gonna have a lot of fun modding games in the future. cant wait for this to release.
Wow that looks really cool, so crazy these days that we can PLAY games that look like this instead of just seeing an edited "This will be portal in 2017" picture
I have a RTX 2060 12gig Zotac Gaming graphics card, It played the Portal RTX just fine It sat on 70% usage and stayed there. Never heard my 2 fans go hard either. Nvidia is lying to us just to make us buy a better graphics card.
Such a good video, I really like how Source looks, even nowadays! I agree with everything said on this video and I wish I could experience Portal with RTX, but my horrible notebook won't let me (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀)
I only noticed the use of macros in this video in order to provide accurate comparison screenshots now. What an unnecessary yet very welcome addition to make the video that much more special! thank you big man
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
Interestingly, Gabe Newell (when developing Portal in 1989) wanted to add an extremely detailed model of himself into the game waving and doing a backflip. Unfortunately it wasn't possible back in the 80's but I'm really thankful he was added to Portal RTX.
Crazy how far Portal came from the original 2D concept on the NES. One of those rare examples of a game in development for over a decade that comes out great.
@@Breadn no it's true, I was portal in 1989.
That idea was scrapped in favor of a photorealistic, three-dimensional cake that we see in the end of the game, honouring the founder of Valve, John Valve.
This is just not true lol.
@@Breadn its true, i know because I'm gabe newell
"Any of you aged 15 or under might not have been born when Portal was released"
I feel ancient now
God I wish I could have played portal or bioshock unspoiled
I am 15, but I still got to play portal and portal 2 unspoiled😄. One of the best games ever in my opinion
Good Lord, me too. I don't normally react poorly to such "revelations" but this one really got me.
@@nonymouswisp8176 I mean hey I'm young enough that I didn't get to play the original Half-Life unspoiled lol
@@brycestinemetz634 luckily I got to play Portal 2 unspoiled due to me being a dumb 10 year old during my first playthrough
the technology behind this (RTX Remix) is actual black magic! It hijacks the DirectX render pipeline and splices in your own assets over existing assets; you could for example tell it to swap out that coffee cup asset for a teapot asset *and that actually works* (and you can then make a mod out of that and send it to others)
Oh and its completely independent of the game itself meaning this allows modding the graphics of any game ever released that can render with DirectX 9 (currently)
So it cannot hijack DirectX 10/11? Is that a limitation that can't be surpassed or is it that RTX Remix only supports DX9 for now?
@@Ferdam due to the usage of shaders... Rtx remix cant do it
Yo is this real? Is the zirconium age of modding upon us?
The amount of DX9 games that use Fixed Function Pipeline Rendering is very small. Portal RTX runs in DX8 mode.
Wow
We are dangerously close to see Heavy's posterior with complete lighting fidelity
pyro's shiny booty
I like how everyone just agrees with this comment
[tick tock by joji]
@@ChrisSucks i am literally going to highertower myself if i hear that gosh darned song one more time
I want him to sit on me.
Portal RTX looks like what my brain remembers portal looking like, which I guess means it does an excellent job haha
It shows how much our brain can fill in the blanks
It's pretty much computer generated nostalgia vision
@@2kliksphilip can you revisit the game Teardown and retest AMD cards 6700xt, 570, and even older/nwer cards just to do a comparison?
That's because the RTX remix was built on top of a compatibility mode version of Portal with very limited visuals. The original game looked good.
one pretty always get appalled with the truth, at how games in the olden days REALLY looked like, not how we remember it looking :)
It's going to be really interesting to bring this kind of tech into the half life 2 maps, given how they run on the same engine and share models and textures between the games
Nvidia is releasing some tools that will make it possible to do ray tracing and even asset swapping in basically any game. You're going to see the modding community blow up making these kinds of remakes and I'm sure half life 2 will be part of that.
Go look up the demo they did of morrowind and it's unbelievable. It will swap models on the fly so you can take the old low poly models and replace them with high polygon models and make the game look almost new
@@anonony9081 oh yeah for sure, I'm more excited for what we can do day 1 in portal rtx for the moment though lol
@@anonony9081 Morrowind already supports resource swapping though, unless there'a some kind of engine limitation this bypasses?
As long as they keep the original art style and ambience of the game. It's easy to lose that kind of thing when making these graphics mods.
@@blunderingfool Imagine that on every game made in D9. Sure, Morrowind already have that, but how about Half Life 2? Halo? GTA VC? Star Wars Old Republic, Splinter, AC2, and a whole lot more of D9 games, added with RTX and DLSS.
I think they might have changed it since the trailer. The lighting looks much more “sterile”, like how vanilla Portal does.
they also fixed the portals - in the trailer there was no opening animation, they just appeared.
They definetely did change it. It was unfair to dismiss Ossy's criticism. It really looked unplayable in the first trailer.
@@AdrianRojasF There are points that still stand, the tile textures are designed completely differently and don't have the same grunge that the originals do, some really rusted metals look like they got a recent clean, the padding on the elevators isn't stained, the lights are all different brightness from the originals, and the pellets still emit way too much light. It's not RTX that's the issue here, I'm happy about the RTX but the new textures aren't great. The glass on the opening room looks great though but its still too clear. I'm hoping we get some more faithful textures in the future, either from nvidia or the community.
@@Synergiance I think with all these new tools there will be lots of half-assed re-releases coming from AAA companies. But also we'll see so much -incredible- stuff from the community, as always.
@@AdrianRojasF if companies will use remix to create half-assed re-releases then modders will use exact same tool to create better versions and re-release them for free
companies will be able to poorly recreate graphics in their older games and ask money for it, sure (actually they're able to do that at any given time, but whatever), but will anybody pay for it if somewhere in the world there will be a group of teenagers with too much free time, who will do that better and for free? doubt it.
modders are already pretty much remastering plenty of games, and without any fancy nvidia technologies too, if game studios want me to pay for same thing, then they MUST do it better
kinda crazy how rtx portal looks like how i remember portal looking like, except the poison piss water which now looks pretty good
and is based on the directX 8 version nice
Yeah Portal is a pretty good candidate for this sort of 'mod'. Portal already had very clean, crisp and "realistic" designs and graphics, so this mod just enhances it IMO. But it def doesn't work in all games, games with heavily stylised looks where the creators intentionally made their game look unrealistic suffer a bit from the super enhanced lighting.
Like the Morrowind example feels weird to me, like it loses a lot of Morrowind's visual identity in the process (although Morrowind is almost unbearably ugly in 2022, at least without heavy nostalgia, so there's a balance). In contrast, I think this tech would make a big difference to Skyrim or Oblivion, which went for more realistic looks than earlier games
the poison piss water was one of the best looking things in portal 2
@@helplmchoking The most unbelievable part of Oblivion was how unbelievably ugly every NPC was.
@@helplmchoking but it doesnt enhance it - it strips the beauty of the og game all the panels are stark white no imperfections on them anymore, and the portals look horrible
The room near the end that "isn't lit" is actually a room you enter a couple minutes later in that same map. (spoilers ahead) when you go through the pipe you end up in a test chamber which can be seen behind the glass
The thing with the Chamber 10 that is after Chamber 19, is that it's always lit, so it being dark in RTX mode is weird.
@@notalostnumber8660 more lighting sources means more calculations so it might be better to have less lights on at a time until they’re in view of the player (might be wrong though)
@@SnickerXYZ but it's supposed to be in view.
@@vyor8837 well yeah but it’s still a pretty expensive game so if a room doesn’t absolutely need to be rendered it’s just not I guess
@@SnickerXYZ That screams "we didn't actually optimize anything at all". Which is... accurate considering that most of the performance loss isn't even in the raytracing bits.
I have no idea how you did those comparisons where you are seemingly in the exact same spot even while moving around, but that's really neat.
getpos and setpos in developer console
+ same engine version to record demo on
In the old half-life engine, you could record and replay gameplay in-engine. Source probably has this feature as well.
demos
networked titles send position and orientation over network...
...write this down to a file - along with a time-stamp - you can play it back.
This was an extremely common feature in the old days. Quake, Halflife, etc.
I personally don't like some of the tech demoey looking assets like the cubes, but I mean shoot, it's a tech demo! I'll be happy to try the game out when it's publicly out.
And of course there will probably be modders making more faithful versions of some of these assets pretty quickly, so it shouldn't be too hard to touch up
I really hope someone makes a version of the mod that has good assets
This. It is tech demoey FIRST and a game second.
Yes there's a lot that has been improved but at the same the over the top pro-RTX changes feels like when 3d gimmicks were pushed in movies so there were things being thrown at the camera constantly, and the asset changes make it feel disjointed and completely changing the feel of the game. Where in the original the static light was often very deliberate now it's all 'oooo RTX, look at the pretty lights'. The light being used as subtle progress hints is also something that's been used for decades now and that is NOT being replicated from what I've seen so far.
Overall it just feels... amateurish. Like some mods that make the game 'better' by people that do not grasp the idea of design consistency.
@harbingerdawn Ultimately this. Modding meritocracy will fix it.
Portal was kind of a tech demo.
In fairness, the weird cubes being shown off in this video are secret settings you have to go out of your way to enable, by default they just look like the originals.
I think my biggest issue is just that it looks so much darker. Walls that used to read to me as white now look gray, and I'm just not the biggest fan of that.
Yeah, it's lost the sterile laboratory feel of the game which is part of what made it stand out. GLADoS isn't some omniscient quasi evil AI, she is a middle manager of a big box store and you're an employee sent to get some stock item.
Imo that should be pretty easy to fix if you have a level designer co-operate. Even though original portal looks more “bland” in comparison, each texture, wall, and model has a specific purpose for being what it is, where it is, and the way it is.
Someone looking at the game from a player’s perspective or even the perspective of someone who hasn’t played it before is likely not going to be able to know those purposes and therefore risks making changes that directly conflict with the original design intentions.
Wait a minute, you mean it's not pronounced "Portalrtx"? Then what the hell have I been saying all this time!?
You could just load the HL2 maps into Portal since they share like literally every asset. There wouldn't be any updated textures or models but you'll still get lighting raytracing, and the combine energy balls I guess.
Noby seems to be commending you for how slick your side by side comparison is here. Great work, number 2.
The first thing I noticed was the cleanness, it isn't something that bothers me but it's noticeable and I would prefer I little more dirt in the walls nevertheless that stile is great in portal 1
Yeah, I noticed that too. The original Portal has a great atmosphere, and a lot of that is down to the dirty/disused feel that the facility has, and how that contrasts with the sterile white aesthetic. It looks like they tried to make the remake closer to the brand-new clean chambers from Portal 2. Can't really complain too much though, it seems like this is pretty much a tech demo with Valve's approval rather than an official remaster or anything like that.
While grunge and dirt is important to photorealism and different art styles, it was often cranked up to 11 in 360 era games to compensate for the lackluster lighting by baking in a ton of high contrast detail to the textures.
Modern remasters will almost always look different because of this. That being said, they may have gone to the complete other end of the spectrum this time and a bit more dirt wouldn't hurt.
It looks like Portal 2 which I don't mind at all.
I think they're using different textures to more align with the story. At 4:12 you can see "dirtier" wall tile textures in the areas behind the testing chambers. I think it meshes with the story really well. In Portal 2, you can clearly see progressively cleaner surfaces as GLaDOS cleans up Aperture after she is reactivated, and I think this portrays that: GLaDOS is keeping the test chambers clean, but she can't "see" behind the scenes so those areas are a little dirtier.
It uses DXVK to translate the game into Vulcan so it can access all the fancy Vulcan ray tracing APIs. It's the same project that gives CSGO vulcan support and is the reason dx 9/10/11 games run so well on Steam Deck, I'm surprised you didn't mention it.
Does that mean with DXVK ye can translate other games too? meaning dx10 & dx11 , why wouldnt they mention this if it was possible. They only said you can only import games with dx8 or dx9 with "fixed pipeline" whatever that means.
If it uses DXVK why cant they translate newer games(maybe they would be to intense for this RTXDI (i think) which they call path tracing
@@DarkoP9.13 i'm not sure how relevant usage of dxvk is to game compatibiliy.
It sounds like the core idea behind rtx remix is presenting a fixed-function interface, and internally using their own fancy raytracing shaders. Stuff that uses the fixed function interface then gets magically raytraced.
Games that don't use the fixed function interface use... well, shaders, which can do whatever they want, and they can (and do) handle, say, lighting, in many different ways.
This is no longer a single interface for you to work with, but effectively a different interface for every game, or even every material. Thus, they don't target those games.
@@DarkoP9.13 One of the slides in Nvidia's presentation was "RTX Remix Runtime: The Machinery Behind the Magic" and DXVK is listed for "D3D9 -> Vulkan Conversion". They didn't mention how D3D8 will work, my guess is maybe they're using dx8to9 + DXVK so DX8 -> DX9 -> Vulkan. That or Nvidia are the one's commissioning the D8VK project that popped up on Github recently.
I'm hoping we can add ancient directX. So I can run this old game that's close to my heart: Little Big Adventure 2
I think seeing that Ray traced would break my brain.
That was dx6, IIRC, which didn't even have translucency, so no actual see-through windows.
Isn't Vulkan owned by AMD? Funny how Nvidia uses it.
The difficult part for me is that, if no comparison was made, I would find most things quite normal. Things seemed way prettier when I played portal for the first time.
It's kinda like mount and blade: in my head, the graphics always looked like bannerlord for all versions.
Warband still has a lot more color and character to it than bannerlord imo
Warband still looks better than bannerlord.
I was looking forward to see you covering this
That L4D clip, what a lad
where's it from?
thanks, I thought I was the ONLY ONE.
@@Heavenira The 2009 pornography, Left 4 Head
@@AuxKipchak bless
I think it’s really cool, but I’m also pretty upset that they didn’t bother remaking the old baked lightmaps for things like windows. The rooms seem so much more bland without the window lighting
This was also my thoughts. I get that it's a tech demo, but lighting was used to quite literally highlight certain parts of puzzles, feel of the level, etc, and a simple replacement doesn't replicate the original intent. I'll enjoy it for what it is, though.
@@p_x_ something that runs like shit?
They probably could have, but the lighting in OG portal is ridiculously unrealistic, the walls are all white, the entire room is white. That shit is going to reflect like hell, so the light wouldn't be nearly as concentrated. The only way to get similar light would be to have the light come exclusively from the window, and it'd need to be fairly dim.
3:11 I think ossys video was less about the betrayal of the games art style but more about the games visual direction and how it influences gameplay. or at the very least thats what I had gathered from it.
crazy how it doesn't look too different on its own, might just be my brain but Portal RTX is just how the original Portal looking in my head. side-by-side, its no contest
its kinda like how i saw videogames as a kid, going back and playing them again they look worse than how i remember
@@deepwebwhirlpool It is a big reason i don't go back and replay some of my favorite games. I enjoy the version of it in my head from when i was a kid and don't want to ruin it.
@@dulcebelluminexpertis4147 that is literally a coping mechanism
@@faizfrez2729so?
@@faizfrez2729 didn't say it wasn't. lol
3:59 your transitions are insane even though you have to game hop between comparisons well done my friend
2:04 i know that this is kinda late, but as portal is based on the source engine, you should be able to use getpos and set pos to have 100% identical footage (just with and without raytracing), if you sync it to the right keyframe (iE the portalgun firing). maybe that helps for future videos :)
otherwise great video as always :)
I think what he meant was like, since there was no way to disable raytracing he couldn't do raytracing comparisons with the new materials, so instead he had to compare the raytraced new portal w/ old materials against the old/og portal
How about recording a demo instead?
@@Pluvillion ;
That's exactly what he did. You see how sometimes the cube "lags" behind mouse movements? that's because Phillip recorded a demo and is playing it back. Also how the jumping at the beginning of the game looked off, that's a telltale sign of being a demo
11:25 ... I never realised how much seeing two *reflections* of a portal would break my brain - I can't even imagine the tech wizardry needed to pull this off either. Mind blowing!
Damn, this is such a perfect game to do raytracing on. When someone did it with Quake 2 it was like "oh, that's some pretty neat lighting I guess" but it just didn't do all that much for imo. But here with the clinical setting and art direction of Portal it REALLY shines. Absolutely gorgeous.
8:51 - I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed that I know that clip reference.
Games always look so much better in your memory than they do when you actually go and look back on them. The original does look very aged.
8:51 Philip is a cultured individual 😏
Didn't know content creators would get early access, good because I was really curious how it would look like outside the promotional content nvidia has released so far..
Still, I'll play it and enjoy the RTX stuff, definitely. People complain too much like if this version was to replace the original one and ruin forever the art style lol
Lastly, the RTX Remix thing is what has brought my attention when they announced it in September, I hope they'll release it soon so I can mess up with it in other older titles
8:52 PHILIP NO. WHY DID YOU UNLOCK A DORMANT PART OF MY BRAIN THAT REMEMBERED THIS?
Nvidia provided us with some really groundbreaking technology to work with. The modding community will go wild with this!
Hopefully it is as good as how they announced it to be. Can't wait to mess around with it
@@Ferdam Can't wait to see ray-traced Bioshock the most! If Nvidia-remix truly uses AI to create screen-based accurate materials - An underwater art-deco city is gonna look so beautiful...
This game is as old as first Portal, so I'm sure Nvidia Remix supports it
Honestly, I'm skeptical about how well this will actually work in practice. I expect this to run into quite a bit of issues that may or may not have a workaround for them without having to touch the original renderer in some way or another.
I guess we'll see in the future if this really is the silver bullet we've all been hoping for.
@@almas4663 Bioshock does not have a fixed function pipeline, if it has shaders, it will not work.
They do this to get Raytracing into games and people to buy their overpriced RTX cards
i absolutely love it how he adds a spoiler alert to such an old game, it may be silly but i'd hate to get such a classic spoiled for me
It's a courtesy and shows respect for the viewer. A good story is still a good story 15 years later, there's no justification in spoiling it for anyone who hasn't heard it yet
"So we can expect modders in the community to make their own raytraced versions of older games very soon."
Gordon Freeman picking up his shiny, raytraced crowbar: "Ah, shit. Here we go again."
Portal is meant to have these rooms that are so high tech and futuristic looking that there's just ambient light everywhere. No shadows or anything. It is meant to be this sanitized environment.
This is a very very bad reimagining of it. Some parts make sense, and maybe it would have been better to do this to Portal 2 than the original, but the rooms are all ruined with this whole "Omg look me, I can add way too much to something meant to be subtle" thing they've got going on.
Portal 2 would look so breathtaking with RTX.
Portal 2 is STILL breathtaking as is, IMO. Played it for the first time since it came out 11 years ago, now on the Switch, and it is fucking stunning.
@@Hysteria98 that’s very true, it is amazing already. But with RTX? Could legitimately be the most beautiful game of all time.
8:51 oh no, I see what you did there :D
I'd love to see the original deus ex with updated visuals and raytracing support. I hope someone talented enough to do it thinks the same
@@dan_loeb There's DX8 and 9 renders for Deus Ex though? Just get Kentie's Launcher.
6:19 To show FPS in the game, you can open console and enter "cl_showfps 1".
While we have two conversations at hand (portal rtx and the technology itself) I think the technology is fascinating. While no doubt it requires some tinkering first, this can be a neat addition to old games that may be forgotten by the devs themselves or are not interested in such graphical updates.
I wonder how such implementation can work with emulators (I hate to pull the emulator card but it'll be necessary for the conversation) some old titles certainly will never see such a graphical remake ever so this could be the next big thing. If people can make High resolution texture packs no doubt some support can come off from it. Whichever scenario it'll be interesting to look forward to.
The Source Engine with RTX is AMAZING :)
cant wait to see crazy development going for RTX half life 2, or any other game tbh. it unlocks such potential
It's weird, all of the dirtyness and brutalism from the old portal was basically removed for no apparent reason? the ligthing looks impressive but the new materials look extremely generic and just look worse to me
That's retextures in a nutshell. Destroy the art style.
Boy I can't wait to turn my PC on and set it on fire with this
I found your channel yesterday after finishing Half Life 2 for the first time (despite having played chapter 1-2 a million times as a kid) and Im so glad I did.
Your Half-Life summary videos are awesome and to-the-point.
My first thought was half life 2 when you mentioned how it’s a platform that did the Ray tracing. I’d honestly even be prepared to drop like 20 bucks on it
This technology still makes my jaw drop. It's insane how much graphics have evolved in such a relatively short time.
Just two days before its going to be released, can't wait to try it out with my raytracing graphics card. I kinda like the futuristic design but something tells me that it doesn't fit. Well, it will give me a reason to replay Portal again.
After playing it I agree with you, while some assets feel a little loud like the cubes, the game feels very natural and looks and feels like Portal unlike videos of it.
The energy ball's light is straight out of r/simulated, beautiful
that video was based on the first trailer. since then, a lot has been improved.
when I saw the reveal trailer, I really disliked the art direction, but I have no issues with the released version.
it was a fun experience to blast thru i can't wait to see people mod RTX into more titles
1:32 why does the lighting look way better in the original portal lmao
8:52 you naughty naughty boy philip.
Cant wait for Skyrim RTX, even though ReShade Path Tracing is pretty good aswell. Now imagine if Nvidia would still push this along with PhysX.
"any of you aged 15 or under may not have been born when it was released"
damn it, I'm officially old
Amazing video, love it!
08:51
Philip, you bastard, you've just uncovered a core memory that I've long forgotten.
Now i've gotta go google it
I think the fact that it looks the same as I remember is testiment to how good looking portal was with it's limited graphics capabilities
Nvidia listened and fixed the portals
instead of dark blue/orange on the inner outline and light blue/orange on the outer outline they fixed it to be light at the bottom then fade darker at the top
Looks fantastic, i imagine the community is gonna go nuts with these HD assets
i personally really love the new elevator, especially how they redid the padded panels. actually feels like aperature intended the test subjects to already be going through mental distress.
the assets in the base game are actually basically the same resolution as here, the view with original assets option actually uses the worst, directx 8 cut down assets so its not a good comparison
@@DemonixTB they aren't, though, even in the non dx8 version. the new assets literally are higher poly and of course pbr
I love that if this game was published by any other company they would sell it as a full remaster for full price
I will definitely learn RTX Remix. I have some games from my childhood that would benefit greatly from raytracing
"It's free for people who already have Portal"
*Look at my poor computer*
Yeah ... well not gonna try...
My main problem with portal RTX is that it looks too clean.
Interesting, I noticed a lot of DLSS 3 artifacts in this video, even watching it at 2.2x speed they were still quite noticeable. I wonder why shadowplay even records these when you have 60 perfectly fine non-artifacted frames per second to use anyway.
Tom Cruise? Is that really you?
Considering that Source already used baked raytracing, I wonder how the calculations for the environmental lighting differ. Since the two look so drastically different.
I just realized they made a bit of a joke in portal 2 about how long it took them between games. 5 years. 5 years is less than average for big titles these days. takes 4x as long because the asset textures are 4x the size.
Very nice comparison footage Philip!
How did you manage to syncronise your movement between the two versions?
Probably he recorded a demo file of his movement.
As a 3080 user, I can confirm you can play this game at 1440p Quality with max RT at stable 60fps.
I hope someone does FEAR in RTX Remix. That would be fucking insane
You're a fucking mad lad for showing this off this is crazy news
Since you can mount Half life 2 on top of Portal ( and therefor Portal RTX ), you should technically be able to use this technology with half life 2 too without really doing anything with the software itself. would be cool if you could test it out!
i am also pretty sure team fortress 2 coud do that as well
I prefer the original personaly. The Portal world is supposed to look dirty, simplistic, and futuristic. You can argue the simplisticness was entirely because of limitation at the time, so I’ll ignore that RTX version majorly screws that up. RTX nails the futuristic look, but tgey made everything squeaky clean.
I would kill for a Dark Souls RTX remix
now that's an idea!!
Its very unlikely to work for any Dark Souls game since theyre all on DX9 or higher.
@@herobrine024 RTX Remix is designed to run on games that are either on DX8 or 9
@@herobrine024 dark souls remastered runs at DX11
@@herobrine024 Given that they did Morrowind which was DX7 or DX8 then this can be possible.
So portal was one of the first FPS (esque) games I ever played. Stuck with integrated graphics from an ancient Phenom II processor. The way Portal RTX looks now is what normal Portal looked like to me when I first played it. PS2 titles were what I was used to, so that mediocre graphical leap might as well have been the Grand Canyon. It was immaculate, spectacular, and all mine.
I really like how ValvE is still such a welcoming company amongst a sea of those who aren't. Even if it is Nvidia, a giant hardware and media conglomerate, it's still a welcome project. So again, thanks ValvE.
Can’t wait to download this and put my 3080 to work 🎉
i hope my 3070 can achieve atleast 60 fps haha
@@hernimaniak2379 It can on 1080p with DLSS on performance, and graphic settings on performance.
This is weird, it's recognizable but it doesn't feel the same. I guess it's proof that there's something about Source graphics which really lends to the atmosphere of the game.
The whole "Portal RTX ruins the OG's art direction" debate doesn't holds much water when you consider that
1) It's not a replacement for the original as it can still be played directly from Steam
2) It's free for all Portal owners on Steam
3) Even in the RTX version you can play with the original assets
It's not like most remasters where the original gets delisted or isn't well preserverd to begin with and the remastered version with more controversially subjective changes is the only way to access to a game you already played but have to pay again
whether it ruins the art direction or not, it has nothing to do with the availability of the RTX or original version.
so that's a wrong point. Just the third one makes sense for what are you trying to demonstrate.
@@MrVicho13 I'm talking about stuff like the GTA trilogy being removed from Steam (and still not being back on Steam) to push a much worse product at full price (personally I always thought "Definitive Edition" looked like ass from the reveal, most people seemed fine with it until they saw how broken the game was)
Portal RTX doesn't tries to erase the original at any level, so if I don't like how it look I can always ignore its existence, it's not like I have a raytracing-capable GPU anyways lol (an it doesn't even enforces to own one to still play the original)
it’s more or less just caught in the crossfire of the complaints on remasters in general
There's no game quite like Portal (not even Portal 2). RTX looks gorgeous. Can't wait to try it someday.
honestly it looks like they toned down and fixed a number of the issues from when ozzy's video was released. i also quite disliked the look in the reveal, but the state its in as of your gameplay looks much better, especially since theres an option to play with the original assets/textures.
i still wish they just used the portal 2 design for the cube, though.
the most perfect game with the most perfect graphics
Many of the new assets are reminiscent of the half life 2 cinematic mod's "improvements", though most of them look pretty good
Fully Modeled Alyx
8:51 idk why that L4D looks familiar but I can't put a finger on it...
Idk about this one... It can look great at times but then you see a fuzzy moving shadow or smeary moving reflection and it completely breaks the immersion. I had the same impressions with Minecraft RTX. Looks great in screenshots and slow pans but when you actually play the game you notice the many temporal artifacts.
I almost mistakenly thought the floor at GLaDOS was pure water. That's a tad bit too reflective for my taste 😅
You should try to load half life 2 maps into Portal with RTX!
RTX remix works in a similar way to Mario 3D All-stars. Although Mario 3D All-stars uses emulation, all HD textures are swapped by Lua scripts before rendering the game
I'm personally not a fan of the redesigned companion cube and translucent buttons, but otherwise this looks pretty incredible. I don't have the hardware for it, but it's neat.
I still remember them Csgo days love your videos 2kliks
Honestly can't wrap my head around people being upset at this game for existing? Portal is ancient, everyone's played it, its like an hour long game for most. This is really just a tech demo, and shows off RTX really amazingly when compared to the old game.
I do like this, I just think it should be recognized that you don’t wanna have THIS be what is pointed to when telling people to play portal.
the buttons look delicious
This is probably one of the more exciting gaphical developments of the last few years
im sure portal rtx had a lot of tweaks but if rtx remix does even 25% of what it claims it can do, we gonna have a lot of fun modding games in the future. cant wait for this to release.
8:51 if you know you know
Wow that looks really cool, so crazy these days that we can PLAY games that look like this instead of just seeing an edited "This will be portal in 2017" picture
Can't wait to make my 2060s scream for dear life.
I have a RTX 2060 12gig Zotac Gaming graphics card, It played the Portal RTX just fine It sat on 70% usage and stayed there. Never heard my 2 fans go hard either. Nvidia is lying to us just to make us buy a better graphics card.
the way light shines through the portals is amazing
Such a good video, I really like how Source looks, even nowadays!
I agree with everything said on this video and I wish I could experience Portal with RTX, but my horrible notebook won't let me (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀)
I only noticed the use of macros in this video in order to provide accurate comparison screenshots now. What an unnecessary yet very welcome addition to make the video that much more special! thank you big man