Thoughts on Portal with RTX

Firstly, as much of a game this is, it’s primarily a tech demo. I feel like a lot of younger people don’t remember that back in the 90s and early 2000s that both ATI (later purchased by AMD and now known as AMD Radeon branding) and Nvidia would regularly release tech demos in the form of applications you could download and run. Heck, ATI even had a whole character they created for their demos, Ruby. She was often the character in focus for their demonstrations. Those demos quietly disappeared over time.

At least, the demos directly from ATI/AMD and Nvidia stopped. But they both have become far more involved in game development leading to games themselves becoming the tech demos for new rendering technologies. One of the earliest I remember was Return to Castle Wolfenstein based on Quake III which had both an ATI specific setting and an Nvidia one. ATI cards had the option for ATI TruForm, a precursor to hardware tessellation that became far more common with the transition to unified shaders and DirectX 11. Nvidia cards on the other hand offered Distance Fog. Enabling it would reduce render load from distant objects by adding a fog layer between. Other Quake III based games also offered these options.

That was roughly 20 years ago now and between then and now Nvidia has started doing full game tech demos. Quake II RTX was the first to show off heavily raytraced real-time game rendering. Even with the highest-end hardware of the time it was brutal on hardware despite being built around a game that was already over 20 years old. It wasn’t designed to be played as a game but to be played to show off raytracing technology. It was used to push sales of their new RTX 2000 series graphics cards, the only cards at the time which could run that form of raytracing.

Several years on, we have the third generation of raytracing cards from Nvidia in the RTX 4000 series. AMD also has their own raytracing capabilities, with next Tuesday's (13 December 2022) release of their RX 7000 series cards being their latest. With the advances in rendering power since the first RTX cards it makes sense to release another tech demo to show how much more powerful the RTX 4090 is versus the RTX 2080 Ti for instance.

That brings us to the release of Portal with RTX today (8 December 2022). Though Portal first released in 2007, it’s been updated to run on newer variants of the Source Engine and now has a fully integrated raytracing renderer. And much like Quake II RTX before it, it is brutally difficult to render without compromises. It also includes another Nvidia-specific technology in the form of DLSS 3.0, a form of AI-accelerated rendering where the game is rendered at a lower resolution for better performance then upscaled and enhanced to run at the native resolution of the display. Both the more advanced raytracing features and the more advanced DLSS are far more demanding on the older RTX (and AMD RX) cards.

In my case I’m still running my RTX 2080 Ti. In most games it’s still quite formidable at 2560x1440 but raytracing is its Achilles’ Heel. At the default settings it started with, it was honestly nauseating to play. It was running in the low 20 frames per second. Reducing the quality of DLSS, to make it easier to render, makes it playable for me without too much of a sacrifice to image quality. It makes the point quickly and efficiently: buy a new graphics card if you really want to enjoy playing this version of the game.

I can still go back to the original Valve build if I want to play it with high performance. But if I want to slowly experience the environments and appreciate the massively upgraded lighting, I can always boot up Portal with RTX.

More importantly, it gives me another game to enjoy when I do upgrade my computer or build a new one. These games come about every so often. They are difficult to run on the hardware that exists at release but eventually become easier to run with subsequent generations of hardware and become more fun to play at higher settings. It’s a show of things to come. It is a tech demo. But, unlike those tech demos that didn’t offer any interaction or reason to go back to them beyond a single running of the application, these newer ones offer a reason to come back. You can play them, interact with them, and improve them over time.

It's still a rather heavy-handed approach to selling graphics cards. But it is also quite effective. Portal is one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. Having it look wildly different, and more environmentally immersive, gives me reason to come back and experience it anew. Replaying with raytracing isn’t the same game that came out in 2007. I don’t think I’ll really enjoy it right now, what with performance being as sloppy as it is for me. But come a year or two with a new graphics card or computer and I know what one of the first games I’m going to try out on the new system will be. And that’s awesome, I think. Something to look forward to enjoying versus simply replaying through a game again. In that, I appreciate what Nvidia has released here. That said, it also won’t distract me from the current scandals surrounding them (most notably with EVGA terminating their relationship with Nvidia). All of my Nvidia cards have been EVGA and to have them drop from the graphics card market due largely to Nvidia’s treatment of them really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

At this point I’m looking solely at AMD cards for my next graphics card. Intel’s entry is well-appreciated, and long in waiting, but they simply aren’t at the performance level I’d want yet. Nor do they have the developer support to really make the experience smooth as an end user. But AMD may just have hit a real home run with the RX 7900 XT(X) and I wait with bated breath for the end of the review embargos next week. What really remains to be seen is how improved their performance is for raytracing. Even if it’s not on par with the RTX 4000 series, if it can meet or exceed the 3000 series that alone would be a massive feather in their cap. I’m iffy on if that will happen, but I suppose there are only a few days left to find out. I suppose now I just need to figure out which brand to choose for an AMD card.