Nvidia is no stranger to path tracing, showcased by the Quake II RTX demo. The blue cast from the hallway travels throughout the scene due to the soft fog and casts blue light far beyond the hallway. That’s not the case in Portal RTX, as you can see in the screenshot below. In addition, post-process elements like street fog don’t carry light further into the scene. In ray-traced reflections, for example, the game calculates some of the data from typical screen space reflections (SSR) depending on what’s being reflected. Path tracing brings all of the disparate aspects of how light behaves in an environment under a single roof, and ends up much more demanding in the process.Ĭyberpunk 2077 takes plenty of shortcuts, too.
Portal RTX is using ray tracing to simulate light. These limitations are necessary shortcuts for a game as grand as Dying Light 2. It’s using ray tracing to enhance certain features in the game. Critically, it doesn’t cast shadows, nor does it pick up the color properties of objects the flashlight interacts with. It traces rays where the flashlight hits a surface and bounces them around the room, creating a soft glow in dark areas where that lighting ends up. A prime example is Dying Light 2‘s ray-traced flashlight. Modern AAA games with ray tracing don’t go through all of that hassle. Multiply this across every pixel and introduce multiple bounces (which Portal RTX does), and each frame becomes a complex string of math that’d make anyone’s head spin. Some of that light is absorbed, other light is reflected, and some breaks off as a refraction. The complications come up with how different objects handle light. It goes in a straight line until it hits an object, bounces, and continues on, eventually going back to the light source. Path tracing works by tracing a line out from your camera. Portal RTX uses path tracing, which you might see Nvidia refer to as “full ray tracing.” That alone isn’t the reason Portal RTX is so demanding - it’s how Nvidia is utilizing path tracing to trace all of the lights throughout a scene, as well as the shadows, reflections, and refractions those lights introduce.
The question is why? Portal is 15 years old at this point, and even with updated assets and rays bouncing around, surely it couldn’t be more demanding than the dense, vibrant open world stuffed with ray-traced lighting that’s available Cyberpunk 2077 (or countless other games with ray tracing).īut it is, and there’s a good explanation for why. Or at the least, it’s the most demanding ray tracing game you might actually play.
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Even with free frames, Portal RTX taxes the RTX 4080 much more than Cyberpunk 2077 does.Ĭyberpunk 2077 and Portal RTX couldn’t be more different (technically and thematically), but it’s a good illustration that Portal RTX might be the most demanding ray tracing game we’ve seen to this point. Portal RTX is a showcase for Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards like the RTX 4090, and in particular, the unique frame-generation capabilities of these GPUs with DLSS 3. In both Cyberpunk 2077 and Portal RTX, I used the same DLSS mode and the highest ray tracing quality preset.
For reference, you can see how the RTX 3070 held up with Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) set to Auto in Portal RTX below.
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Even Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, which uses full ray-traced global illumination, is leagues easier to run than Cyberpunk 2077.īut Portal RTX is even more taxing.
Even two years after launch, Cyberpunk 2077 is the most demanding game in my GPU benchmark suite, both with ray tracing on and off. Portal RTX is way more demanding than you probably think. Ray tracing is taxing, but it’s how Portal RTX is leveraging ray tracing that makes it the next-gen benchmark I’ve been waiting for. Portal RTX is the most demanding game I’ve tested, and running it is only possible with clever image reconstruction techniques and the fastest GPUs on the market today.
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