STOP DOING HYPER REALISM
VIDEO GAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE
YEARS OF SO CALLED TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND IN MAKING A GAME HAVE MORE REALISTIC VISUAL AESTHETICS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 4

Wanted to look better anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called "ART DIRECTION"

"Yes give me SLIGHTLY more smudges on that brown stained floor, give me slightly more lighting that completely destroys the art style at the cost of taking HALF A YEAR from my graphics card's life expectancy." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

Look at what NVidia and it's mafia of bitcoin miners have been demanding your money all this time, with all the decades worth of beautiful low spec games in your backlog.
???????????
"Hello I would like my games to run and look worse please"
They have played us for absolute fools.

its portal but everything is shinyyyy and reflections!!!

seriously though imo visually its a downgrade from the OG portals atmosphere, and i can only see this being good as a tech demo if you bought a new computer or something idk.

its also very un-optimised unless your gpu supports DLSS 3. you're just better off playing the OG

2/10. Dreadful. Fucking Dreadful.

My eyes actually hurt now, that's how irritating this was to look at. Nvidia really thought "Ah yes, sharper image + more shadows + overly bright lighting = Better game" like the absolute tools they are.

On top of the nauseating visuals and frame choppiness (I have a 3070 ti so that's ridiculous) this mod introduces actual bugs, most notably, moving platforms just... not doing what they're supposed to do, and falling asleep.

They even think they're being slick and hip with the secret 'Nivida processors sent to Black Mesa and Aperture' easter egg, fuck off. Fuck off with the nvidia cube as well, low-effort advertisement in a shitty mod for a great game you've desecrated.

I can't give it a 1/10 as, at its core, it's still Portal, an incredibly fun atmospheric, comedic puzzle game. Having said that, dear god just play the original Portal, not this RTX horseshit. Pay no heed to the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX as well, it's likely to be just as shit.

This has to be the funniest marketing gimmick ever made. Honestly. It makes the Hatsune Miku Dominos promotion or the Saint's Row 4 ultimate edition seem tame.

For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu. If you want to play Portal 1 for free you can get this, push Alt+X and disable everything. [This ended up not being true, I forgot that I owned Portal 1.]

But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.

As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.

Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.

The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.

Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.

But.

But.

There's a worse problem.

Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.

When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...

...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.

And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.

I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.

The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.

Clássico atemporal, e nunca vai deixar de ser. É conciso e se preocupa apenas com o essencial, o que é traduzida pelo tamanho da duração do jogo e o tamanho do seu impacto nessa mídia. Uma única mecânica, abrir e fechar portais, em que o jogo se envolve por ela e permite ao jogador quebrar o design do jogo com a mecânica, se assim ele quiser.

Isso é foda, por que no final das contas, Portal é um jogo sobre ruptura. Somos Chell, uma mera cobaia comandada pela GladOS, até que não somos mais. É uma jornada sobre emancipação a partir da ruptura do exercício de pensar, pensar e pensar nos usos mais mirabolantes que a Portal Gun e toda a fisicalidade que são oferecidas nos permitem.

O bolo é uma mentira, assim como os avisos nas paredes desse laboratório vazio e enigmático nos dizem, mas o que é verdade? Portal 2 nos responde!

Ah, joguei a versão RTX, e é bem bacana e se parece até mais com um remaster por que substituiram bastante texturas e tal, mas é bem pesado e tem muito problema com perfomance. Deu pra tirar ótimos prints, entretanto: https://i.imgur.com/xwvxi04.jpeg