Portal is getting a ray-traced upgrade this fall

polygon.com:

Portal fans will be able to see the test chambers of Aperture Science in a whole new light this fall, when Nvidia releases Portal with RTX, an updated version of the classic first-person platformer that brings ray-traced graphics to the game.

Announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his Nvidia GTC keynote on Tuesday, Portal with RTX “reimagines the classic game’s graphics with full ray tracing and entirely new art evocative of the original,” Nvidia said in a blog post. In terms of what exactly “full ray tracing” means, Nvidia said that the game will use ray tracing for every light and the shadows it casts, as well as for indirect lighting and global illumination; light scattering through volumetric effects such as fog and smoke; and reflections based on materials like metal surfaces. Many more details are available in the blog post.

Portal with RTX will be available as free downloadable content for people who already own the original Portal, Nvidia announced. Presumably this refers only to those who have a copy on Steam; Nvidia’s blog post links to a Steam listing for Portal with RTX. Nvidia is referring to it as a mod for the original game; it’s unclear if it will be possible to buy Portal with RTX separately, without owning a copy of Portal. It’s worth noting that while the add-on’s name has “RTX” in it — a term that Nvidia uses to market its ray tracing-capable graphics cards and associated technologies — the Steam page says that Portal with RTX will be “compatible with all ray-tracing capable GPUs.”

Nvidia said that its in-house Lightspeed Studios team made Portal with RTX by building on its experience adding ray tracing to Quake 2 and Minecraft. But Lightspeed developed Portal with RTX using a new tool, Nvidia