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Portal with RTX released free on Steam

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Free for owners of the original, Portal with RTX has released on Steam from Lightspeed Studios / NVIDIA.

There's no Native Linux support this time around, unlike with Quake II RTX, but it should still work with Steam Play Proton (NVIDIA told me it works). Valve even added a configuration for it to have NVAPI enabled for Proton by default.

I'm unable to currently test it myself, as the people who run RPMFusion for Fedora have not updated the NVIDIA drivers for Fedora 37 yet from the recent security incident and you need a minimum NVIDIA driver version of 525.60.11. It doesn't need an NVIDIA GPU though, as they say it works on any GPU that supports Vulkan Ray Tracing.

You can see their launch party video below:

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Some of what's been added includes:

  • Full ray tracing - Portal with RTX uses a ray tracing technique known as path tracing or full ray tracing, which unifies all lighting effects, such as shadows, reflections, refractions and more, into a single ray tracing algorithm.
  • NVIDIA DLSS 3– DLSS 3 is a revolutionary breakthrough in neural graphics that massively boosts performance. Powered by fourth generation Tensor Cores and new Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, DLSS 3 uses AI to generate additional high-quality frames with great image quality and responsiveness.
  • NVIDIA Reflex - Improves responsiveness by reducing end to end system latency, enabling players to feel more connected and immersed in the experience.
  • NVIDIA Real Time Denoisers (NRD) is a new spatio-temporal ray tracing denoising library that assists in denoising ray traced images in real-time, with superior performance and quality.
    A new lighting system made possible by NVIDIA RTXDI, NVIDIA ReSTIR GI and the addition of physically based materials/rendering (PBR):
  • NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) enables the addition of countless direct light sources, big and small, each casting light and shadows.
  • NVIDIA Reservoir Spatio Temporal Importance Resampling Global Illumination (ReSTIR GI) enhances indirect light, enabling it to bathe a scene and illuminate dark corners that are not lit directly. And it also works smarter than previous ray-traced global illumination techniques, improving the efficiency of our ray tracing denoiser.
  • Physically based materials/rendering (PBR) – the environment of Portal’s Aperture Labs is upgraded with material properties that emulate real life. This PBR system supports material properties for light emission, roughness, and metallicity that combine with ray tracing to enable lighting effects such as reflections, refraction, translucency, transparency and global illumination.
  • More detailed models – in-game objects have been remodeled to add more detail and increase realism.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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28 comments
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StalePopcorn Dec 8, 2022
Dang, almost makes me wish I had an Nvidia card
d10sfan Dec 8, 2022
It kind of works on amd cards through Proton if you use amdgpu-pro (VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/amd_pro_icd64.json %command%). Runs at 3-4 fps though, in menu and in-game, so not really playable.
Phlebiac Dec 8, 2022
@Liam, you could try the negativo17 repo for Nvidia drivers (I've used it for years); it's got the 525 driver.
https://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/
DefaultX-od Dec 8, 2022
So far, so good. But I can not get fsr and dlss to work at the same time, whenever I change in game resolution it starts to have some weird scaling issues. Also, I can't access steam overlay. The overall performance is good, mostly 50-60fps, but stupid elevator is at 30fps.

important info: To access DLSS and RTX settings, you need to press alt + x


Last edited by DefaultX-od on 9 December 2022 at 11:04 am UTC
peta77 Dec 8, 2022
Manjaro already has the required driver, so I did a short test @ 4K..
Well, it... works... Framerate is at 12-14 most of the time, with some dips down to 8fps, especially when carrying cubes and near portals, and some highs at 17fps (in the elevator, so not that relevant)..
so, at least not worse than quake-rtx, but not really playable either.. wouldn't spent an hour or two with it with that performance...
maybe runs better and is playable at lower resolutions...
pete910 Dec 8, 2022
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Seriously, **** windows only.


**** Nvidia .
Snowdrake Dec 8, 2022
Maybe a stupid question, but how about Steam deck ?
Is this out of the question ? Or should be up to the task ?

EDIT : Pretty dumb actually* Judging by quake 2 rtx performance, this should'nt run well on deck.


Last edited by Snowdrake on 8 December 2022 at 7:37 pm UTC
MrKiasu Dec 8, 2022
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Liam, could you ask nvidia if frame generation is supposed to be available on Linux for 40xx cards? I don't see the option available here, although the game works fine in every other way.
peta77 Dec 8, 2022
Tried with 2K: doesn't work for me in fullscreen.. but with windowed mode i got a stable 35fps... until it deadlocked and crashed... and took the steam client with it...


Last edited by peta77 on 8 December 2022 at 7:04 pm UTC
Terrace Dec 8, 2022
Hmm i thought to make use of DLSS i'd need to go down to a lower resolution (so it has somewhere to scale up to?), but doing that causes the client to become a strange window where where you click isn't where you click in the client. It took me ages to go down-and-right enough pixels to click where the cursor really believes it is to even get back to 3440x1440, and then my FPS was dang terrible with a 3080 card.

pressing Alt-X i did manage to turn a few things down, but apparently the effects weren't going to be fully apparent until a restart, and i really don't have time before I'm about to do some gaming with someone else.

Looking forwards to when people have come up with a few launch options and other tips on protonDB and such to get some sort of middle ground between looking nice and playable.


Last edited by Terrace on 8 December 2022 at 7:24 pm UTC
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