Portal is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment; similar to how Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun innovated new ways to leverage an object in any given situation.

Players must solve physical puzzles and challenges by opening portals to maneuvering objects, and themselves, through space.

Today NVIDIA has debuted Portal: Prelude RTX, available today at 12 PM PT as a free download on Steam and playable for anyone who owns the original version of Portal. 

In Portal:Prelude RTX, performance is accelerated with NVIDIA DLSS 3, system latency is minimized using NVIDIA Reflex, and texture load time is faster with  NVIDIA RTX IO. 

To deliver the best gaming experience possible, NVIDIA also released a new GeForce Game Ready Driver for Portal: Prelude RTX. 

Modders Remaster a Beloved Portal Mod

Portal: Prelude is an unofficial Portal prequel first released in 2008, and is set before the time of GLaDOS. Portal: Prelude features an extremely challenging 8-10 hour campaign composed of 19 new test chambers, new advanced gameplay mechanics, a fully voiced story with NPCs, and more. Portal: Prelude is the highest-rated Portal mod, the 2008 Portal ModDB winner, and #3 overall Player’s Choice mod of 2008.

Portal: Prelude RTX is a community remaster of this classic Portal mod, created with NVIDIA RTX Remix and featuring full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3, NVIDIA Reflex and NVIDIA RTX IO to deliver the ultimate Portal Prelude experience for GeForce RTX gamers. It is the first remaster created entirely by modders with the RTX Remix creator toolkit.

To bring Portal: Prelude RTX to life, NVIDIA collaborated with Nicolas "NykO18" Grevet, the original creator of Portal Prelude, and famous modder David “Kralich” Driver-Gomm to modernize Portal: Prelude’s assets and relight the game with stunning full ray tracing, also known as path tracing.

Portal: Prelude RTX is the latest showcase title for NVIDIA RTX Remix, a free, upcoming modding platform built on NVIDIA Omniverse, which enables modders to quickly create and share RTX mods for classic games, with enhanced materials, full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3, and NVIDIA Reflex.

Portal: Prelude RTX is loaded with cutting-edge graphics technologies. Within a short eight months, the mod team of five upgraded every frame with stunning full ray tracing, new, hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures, and new, enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals. 

NVIDIA RTX Delivers Big Performance Upgrades in Portal: Prelude RTX

NVIDIA DLSS 3, NVIDIA Reflex, and NVIDIA RTX IO will give GeForce RTX gamers the definitive Portal Prelude experience.

DLSS 3 results in a performance upgrade of  5X on average at 4K with max settings, delivering 80 FPS+ gameplay, for GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 users.

NVIDIA RTX IO delivers 5X faster texture load times in Portal: Prelude RTX and utilizes 44% less disk space. 

NVIDIA RTX IO Dramatically Reduces Texture Load Times

Portal: Prelude RTX features NVIDIA RTX IO, which enables rapid GPU-based loading and asset decompression with optimizations through our Game Ready Driver for both the DirectX and Vulkan APIs. 

RTX IO is based on GDeflate, an open GPU compression standard contributed by NVIDIA, which is utilized by both Microsoft’s DirectStorage and new Vulkan Extensions. Portal: Prelude RTX leverages the new Vulkan Extensions. 

Game Ready for Portal: Prelude RTX

To support the release of Portal: Prelude RTX, NVIDIA released a new GeForce Game Ready Driver for Portal: Prelude RTX. The new Game Ready Driver is optimized for Portal: Prelude RTX, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and other games, and gives you the highest levels of performance when using NVIDIA RTX IO and DirectStorage for Windows in the two titles.

Support for GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (16GB) Custom Cards From Partners

In May, NVIDIA introduced the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti powered by the ultra-efficient NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture and supercharged with DLSS 3. In-game, it delivers over over 100 frames per second in many of today’s graphically advanced titles.

Starting this month, NVIDIA’s graphics card partners, including ASUS, Colorful, Gainward, Galax, Gigabyte, INNO3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac will begin offering 16GB versions of the card. In most games, both versions of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (8GB and 16GB) will deliver the same level of performance, because the specs are otherwise identical. There are a handful of games which play best at “High” settings presets on the RTX 4060 Ti (8GB), and “Ultra” settings on the RTX 4060 Ti (16GB). Today’s driver supports the new 16GB versions.

More Game Ready Driver Goodies and Upgrades

• This is the driver to use for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, launching July 26th with DLSS 3, advanced ray tracing, Reflex, and RTX IO
• This is the driver to use for Remnant II, available July 25th with DLSS 
• Adds support for 3 new G-SYNC Compatible displays, including:
• • LG 27PG95R
  • Panasonic 48MZ1800
  • Dell AW2724DM
• Adds GeForce Experience’s one-click optimal settings for 7  new games:
• • Aliens: Dark Descent
  • BattleBit Remastered
  • EA SPORTS™ F1Ⓡ 23
  • Six Days in Fallujah
  • Undawn
  • Veiled Experts
  • Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War