One of the biggest upgrades to texture load times in years just debuted in a free Portal mod

pcgamer.com:

Portal: Prelude, a Portal mod made by Nicolas «Nyk018» Grevet, just received the RTX remaster treatment 15 years after its initial release. The mod now includes full path tracing, DLSS 3, and Nvidia Reflex support. It also achieves a first for PC gaming: it's the first game to support RTX IO, Nvidia's implementation of a new standard aiming to speed up texture loading times and reduce file sizes.

Portal: Prelude RTX is available from today over at Steam. Any RTX-branded GPU will seemingly be able to run the game—an RTX 2060 is the minimum requirement, though you'd likely require more power to really kick path tracing into overdrive.

The new release is not just a technical overhaul, either, there's new voice acting and new test chambers to get angry at included in the new and improved mod.

But the big thing is that RTX IO support, as this is the first game (mod) to ever support the new GPU decompression technology.

RTX IO is a way to shift the job of decompressing game assets, namely high resolution textures, from the CPU and instead give it to the GPU. This is done to reduce the time it takes to load textures in.

Take this cake from Portal: Prelude, shown in a test video from Nvidia. Without RTX IO, the cake's textures are fully loaded in 3:46 seconds. 

With RTX IO enabled, the cake is loaded in 1:01 seconds—more than 3x faster.

RTX IO is Nvidia's way of implementing GDeflate on its own GPUs. GDeflate is an open source data compression scheme, and an important step in better utilising the hardware that most of us already have in our PCs. But to understand why that is you have to look into why today's CPU-based decompression isn't an ideal solution.

While playing a game, the CPU spends a lot of cycles dealing with