Portal RTX Review

Just when we thought we had seen it all, an interesting proposal arrives, the famous game Portal receives an interesting update full of reflections. Portal with RTX has been in our hands for several days and with new RTX 4080 GPUs we are going to tell you about our experience.

Portal It’s that classic game that we’ve always loved but at the same time makes us feel proud to have played at its launch. Now NVIDIA has decided to do an incredible job of turning it into a practically new version on a visual level.

Before continuing, we are going to touch on several important points when it comes to seeing the results with the RTX 4080, first of all I will leave you with the technical specifications of my PC for this review:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X 8-core 16-thread clocked at 4.6 GHz – 36MB Total Cache
• MoBo: AsRock B550-AM Gaming with BIOS 2.00
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 DRAM 3200MHz C16
• Screen: AOC AGON 4 Pro 240Hz 1440p, 1ms, HDR 600, NVIDIA G-SYNC Ultimate
• Power Supply: EVGA 850 Semi-modular Silver
• Resizable Bar: Switched on
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition

On the other hand we must take into account the specifications that NVIDIA has shared. Portal with RTX’s full ray tracing is incredibly demanding, pushing graphics cards to the limit. If we want to reach more than 60FPS with ray tracing activated we must have an RTX 4080 in the case of 1440p and 4K resolutions.

Knowing all this, let’s move on to the site tests with ray tracing on and without ray tracing. In addition to tests with NVIDIA technologies such as DLSS 3 and Frame Generation. As can be seen in the first image with the highest possible graphic quality in the game, it throws only 55 fps on average, causing the game to look beautiful but at the same time somewhat complicated by all the movement we need to do.

The same FPS average was maintained in the other scenes, leaving me to understand that this value will not change in its entirety. As you can see the environment is quite alive and everything is based on reflections along with a hugely incredible quality.

In this second image as you can see, the options DLSS 3 were activated together with the option frame generation. Much of the settings in developer mode were at the highest quality possible and can be seen as an improvement to 124 FPS in the same spot. After moving through a few other areas the same average rate remained practically the same.

The improvements in the game are palpable and make these new technologies in a game that was released in 2007 feel outdated in terms of performance. It can feel like my PC’s components are stressed trying to process so much image and reflections. Much of my tests I was able to see how compared to other games I have been testing my CPU and GPU are at stable temperatures while with Portal RTX things are different.

Something important that I was able to identify is this little easter egg, where we can see a RTX 4090 in the office capsule when we start a new game. It should be noted that the dimension of this card (as you can see in the photo) is quite large compared to the real gpu.

When I really mean that the game has changed completely, I mean that the textures are totally different. As the images below show, we can see what a difference from heaven to earth really is.

In conclusion

Portal with RTX is the best way to experience that classic game that had us all wrapped up in its time. With totally improved textures and a huge amount of reflections throughout the game thanks to the implemented ray tracing, it becomes an excellent bet so that we can test if our PC is worthy of saying that it is powerful. The new NVIDIA technologies do their job improving up to practically double the fps shown, giving us even better visual satisfaction of seeing the game quite fluid without costing us anything in image quality. This version of the game will put your hardware to the test and make all your components feel the power of pure ray tracing. This review was made with a PC and an RTX 4080 GPU. This Early Access copy is thanks to NVIDIA.