Coming January 5th!

Looks like Reddit user Spacefish008 got Portal with RTX running on a 5700 XT. They note that they get “~45 FPS on 846x643” on High settings. All that’s needed is the RADV_PERFTEST=rt,emulate_rt %command% launch parameter. The OP explains how this works: It uses DirectX and DXVK exposes the DXR APIs to the game if it detects raytracing support in the underlying Vulkan driver. The Vulkan driver is RADV, which can emulate raytracing via shaders on older-gen AMD GPUs like NAVI10 / RDNA1.

Great news, Portal with RTX is out now! Per the Steam store page description: Experience the critically acclaimed and award-winning Portal™ reimagined with ray tracing in this free DLC for Portal owners. Start thinking with portals, with RTX on. I’d love to report how it runs…if I had a RTX GPU. I should have just kept the Thelio as an excuse to try it. If you don’t have a RTX GPU clicking “Play Game” won’t do anything.

Portal with RTX was originally scheduled to show up sometime this month. But according to NVIDIA, it’s been pushed back to December 8th. This free DLC brings “full ray tracing” and “DLSS 3 to one of the best video games of all time.” Experience the critically acclaimed and award-winning Portal™ reimagined with ray tracing. Every frame of gameplay is upgraded with stunning full ray tracing, new, hand-crafted hi-res physically based textures, and new, enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals, all in stunning 4K.

On Friday, both Portal and Portal 2 got an update. Both games upgraded to DXVK version 2.0. DXVK 2.0 brought with it memory management improvement, bug fixes, reduced shader compilation stutter, and plenty of other improvements. Portal 2, in addition to getting the DXVK update, also “fixed some controller input bugs.” While it may seem like a small update, now my speculation gears are flowing. Portal with RTX is “coming soon”; sometime this month, but no word on what day.

KIWI TALKZ interviews various employees (or ex-employees) from Valve and Retro Studios. He was the one who conducted the famous interview with Valve writer Eric Wolpaw, who had expressed his interest in writing Portal 3. Well, there’s also the interview with Portal 2 lead designer Josh Weier. There was one interesting clip where he talks about how Super Metroid influenced the introduction to Portal 2: We had this problem in the game which was if you just played Portal, we didn’t want to make you learn portals all again.

A few months back Gardiner Bryant showed off the Half-Life vinyl wrap that he got for his Steam Deck. Come to find out he got the skin from Moskeeto Designs. I really liked the Portal-themed skin that he has, so I got in touch and asked if he would send it over for review. Turns out he sent me all four of his skins (for some reason he’s not selling the Minecraft skin anymore; it has since been replaced with the Space Commander skin)!

About a week ago during the Nintendo Direct Mini, Nintendo announced Portal: Companion Collection for the Nintendo Switch, and it came to the eShop the same day. Curious George (that is, me) wanted to do a comparison between running the games on the Steam Deck and on Nintendo’s current-gen console, and see how each platform fares. I couldn’t help but find it ironic that Valve would partner with Nintendo right around the time the Steam Deck embargoes were lifted earlier this year, and I had concocted some theories as to why they were doing this.

Just a few days ago, Valve released the Portal series to the Nintendo Switch, known as Portal: Companion Collection. It didn’t take long for dataminers to discover new, unreleased beta content that never showed up in the final product as a result of this port. From Ossy Flawol’s YouTube video, it appears there are at least nine beta maps from Portal 2. The video then goes on to show these maps as Chell explores them.

The podcast that Kiwi Talkz had with Eric Wolpaw – one of Valve’s writers – has been reported on by many media outlets. Specifically about bringing Portal 3 to life. “Let’s do it!” Wolpaw says. “I’m not getting any younger.” But here’s the problem: Wolpaw doesn’t have much “power” at Valve. Someone higher up at the corporation would have to give the green light in order for them to even consider it.