At this time, NVIDIA has readied an enormous shock known as Portal: Prelude RTX for PC avid gamers. Designed as the newest showcase title for RTX Remix, Portal: Prelude RTX might be obtainable on Steam beginning at 12 PM PT as a free obtain to all homeowners of the unique sport.

It’s a group remaster of Portal: Prelude, the fan-favorite award-winning mod for Valve’s sport. It is the primary sport made by modders who had early entry to the RTX Remix creator toolkit, and it was designed to leverage all of NVIDIA’s cutting-edge applied sciences: path tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 2 and three (which increase efficiency by 5X at 4K and max settings, in response to NVIDIA, permitting 80+FPS on RTX 4080 and 4090 GPUs), NVIDIA Reflex, and NVIDIA RTX IO. The long-awaited suite of GPU-based loading and decompression applied sciences debuts right here, delivering 5X sooner texture load instances in Portal: Prelude RTX and lowering occupied disk house by 44%.

On high of that, the remaster packs a difficult 8-10 hour marketing campaign composed of 19 new check chambers, new superior gameplay mechanics, and a completely voiced story with NPCs.

Wccftech has the news on Portal: Prelude RTX and all its options, because of a chat with Nyle Usmani, Product Supervisor for RTX Remix at NVIDIA. As a aspect word, there is a new Sport Prepared driver obtainable for obtain at this time, optimized for this RTX remaster.

What was concerned in including RTX to Portal: Prelude RTX?

We developed RTX Remix to make it simple to show RTX On in basic video games. Utilizing RTX Remix, all the geometry, textures, and lights from Portal Prelude had been transformed to USD (the common scene descriptor file format) after which imported into the appliance to be additional modified. Each asset within the sport was both ported into Portal: Prelude RTX from Portal With RTX or remade by the mod group by hand through Omniverse linked functions like Blender. In complete, the mod group made a whole bunch of recent props and textures for this remaster, all gorgeously rendered with bodily correct supplies and immense element for 4K gaming.

RTX Remix features a customized D3D9 runtime that may act rather than the D3D9 runtime that the sport ships with–this enables us to switch the outdated rendering APIs and methods with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan ray traced renderer. This allows the addition of path tracing to basic video games and all of it updates in real-time as lights and objects transfer. Gentle could be solid from behind the participant or from one other room, and in Portal: Prelude RTX, gentle even travels by way of portals. Glass refracts gentle, surfaces replicate element based mostly on their glossiness, objects can self-reflect, and oblique gentle from off-screen illuminates and impacts every part you see. DLSS 3 permits us to focus on an extremely correct simulation of sunshine whereas preserving the expertise clean and FPS excessive.

On high of the graphical modifications, Portal: Prelude RTX additionally contains up to date gameplay and totally voice acted dialogue, making this the definitive method to play the sport.

How many individuals labored on this undertaking?

It was a surprisingly small group. We truly reached out to the unique creator of the Portal Prelude mod, Nicolas “Nyko18” Grevet and talked him into popping out of modder retirement and spearheading the undertaking. He partnered with well-known modder David “Kralich” Driver-Gomm. The mod group behind the remaster was 5 individuals in complete, together with two voice actors from the mod group.

How a lot time did it take from begin to end?

The group of 5 individuals had Portal: Prelude RTX fully remastered in lower than eight months.

Does Portal: Prelude RTX assist Ada Lovelace’s {hardware} path tracing optimizations, like Shader Execution Reordering (SER), Displaced Micro-Mesh (DMM), and Opacity Micro-Maps (OMM)?

Portal: Prelude RTX makes use of the latest model of the RTX Remix runtime, which incorporates superior denoisers and enhancements to CPU and GPU efficiency for current path tracing methods.

For Portal: Prelude RTX and future NVIDIA RTX Remix mods, the NVIDIA RTX Path Tracing SDK has been enhanced, bettering denoiser efficiency and high quality. That is notably useful at decrease resolutions, the place avid gamers with older GeForce RTX GPUs can have a greater expertise.

Portal: Prelude RTX helps Shader Execution Reordering (SER). SER dynamically reorganizes inefficient ray tracing workloads into significantly extra environment friendly ones, additional accelerating GeForce RTX 40 Sequence efficiency. This results in higher effectivity and ultimately higher efficiency.

Opacity Micro Meshes (OMM) improve real-time efficiency and reminiscence compression for advanced geometry, additional accelerating GeForce RTX 40 Sequence ray tracing efficiency, and with new CPU optimizations debuting in Portal: Prelude RTX, gamers obtain even sooner efficiency.

NVIDIA DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex additionally make an look in Portal: Prelude RTX however have each been upgraded to their latest variations for improved efficiency, even higher picture high quality, and extra responsive gameplay. The sport additionally options NVIDIA RTX IO, enabling extremely quick loading.

The remainder of the tech is fairly in step with Portal With RTX.

Portal: Prelude RTX is the primary sport to function RTX IO. What’s RTX IO precisely?

RTX IO is a set of applied sciences that permits fast GPU-based loading and asset decompression with optimizations by way of our Sport Prepared Driver for each the DirectX and Vulkan APIs. RTX IO is predicated on GDeflate, an open GPU compression commonplace contributed by NVIDIA, which is utilized by each Microsoft’s DirectStorage and new Vulkan Extensions. Portal: Prelude RTX leverages the brand new Vulkan Extensions.

NVIDIA RTX IO delivers as much as 5X sooner texture load instances in Portal: Prelude RTX and makes use of 44% much less disk house! It is a big boon to modders as they will design their property within the highest constancy whereas taking over a smaller footprint on individuals’s arduous drives.

Does Portal: Prelude RTX solely work on NVIDIA GPUs?

Portal: Prelude RTX makes use of Vulkan ray tracing and will run on any Vulkan RT-capable graphics card. We’ve optimized the sport to make sure a very good expertise on all RTX GPUs, however Portal: Prelude RTX is greatest skilled on RTX 40 Sequence GPUs with DLSS 3 resulting from how intensive and leading edge path tracing is.

So NVIDIA RTX IO works on AMD and Intel GPUs, appropriate?

Sure. If a developer implements RTX IO, they get cross-platform assist for DirectStorage and Vulkan.

Does RTX IO use tensor cores?

No. RTX IO leverages the open commonplace GDeflate, which is designed to run on as many parallel cores within the GPU as attainable. GDeflate is an open GPU compression commonplace contributed by NVIDIA.

Is RTX IO compression lossy or lossless?

GDeflate is lossless.

How is the work on the RTX Remix creator toolkit coming alongside? Do you’ve an ETA to share on when it would enter early entry?

Nicolas Grevet and David Driver-Gomm are the primary modders to obtain the RTX Remix creator toolkit. We might be increasing the group of modders with early entry quickly.

What do you concentrate on the group’s creations because you launched the RTX Remix runtime?

We find it irresistible. There’s a community-run Discord group the place 5,000 modders are using the RTX Remix runtime to remaster over 80 video games. The diploma of ardour we’ve already seen is mindblowing, and I’m struggling to know what they’ll produce once we lastly put the creator toolkit of their fingers. We encourage anybody excited about RTX Remix mods to affix the “RTX Remix Showcase” Discord group and have a look.

Can creators anticipate elevated stability for mesh hashes in future variations of RTX Remix?

One of many earliest modifications we applied with the runtime was bettering our mesh hashing system to extend stability–it’s one thing we’re all the time preserving our eye on. RTX Remix is groundbreaking tech in that visuals and property are being changed on the fly at playback however it’s all the time unlucky when one thing breaks and a brand new asset fails to render at full constancy or as a changed asset.

We will affirm our new runtime permits for rather more steady meshes in Portal: Prelude RTX than was current in Portal with RTX and as a result of speedup in asset streaming with RTX IO, property load in at full high quality at lightning-fast speeds.

Will there be any approach to enhance particle physics and/or smoke, as an illustration, sooner or later?

We had predicted once we open sourced the RTX Remix runtime that modders may contribute code to the runtime that might modernize fluid simulation for smoke and hearth. Up to now, there hasn’t been a group effort on this entrance. We do discover this house attention-grabbing however don’t have anything to announce at this time.

What a couple of potential scripting language so as to add new performance to video games?

It could be cool to allow scripting for dynamic conditional replacements. For instance, make the lights flip off when a person enters a room or add fog in a room when a sure asset flies in.

As of now, we’ve nothing to announce, however it’s the form of addition we predicted may occur once we open sourced the RTX Remix runtime.

Do you intend to enhance the accessibility of utilizing RTX Remix?

The RTX Remix runtime is open supply and obtainable for anybody to dig into. We’re all the time working to make the instrument as simple to make use of as we will. And for individuals who wish to dive deep, we’re very energetic within the aforementioned group run Discord and are all the time maintaining a tally of tasks which might be evolving shortly.

Once more, we encourage anybody excited about RTX Remix mods to affix the Discord group.

Is there anything you want to add about what’s subsequent for this instrument?

We’re hyper centered on getting the RTX Remix creator toolkit obtainable to extra individuals as quickly as we will, and we will’t wait to see what modders do after they get their fingers on it. We hope everybody enjoys enjoying Portal: Prelude RTX, the primary mod made by the group with early entry to the RTX Remix creator toolkit. It’s an indication of what’s to return with respect to RTX Mods that push the graphical horizon.

Thanks to your time.