Free Portal update adds ray tracing this November

(Image credit: Nvidia/Valve)

As part of today's GeForce Beyond event, Nvidia revealed Portal with RTX, a free update for the beloved first-person puzzler which will introduce full ray tracing.

Portal with RTX will launch on an unspecified date in November as a bit of free DLC on Steam. While the release is being promoted by Nvidia, the wording of the announcement suggests that ray tracing will be available on any hardware "capable of running Vulkan ray-traced games." Check out the video below for an idea of what it will look like.

It's absolutely stunning, and looks like a terrific reason to revisit Portal 15 years after its original launch.

As with previous Nvidia-sponsored ray tracing updates, like those applied to Quake 2 and Minecraft, this one is only available on PC. However, this Portal with RTX is built differently, as part of a new project called RTX Remix.

RTX Remix is a mod tool that effectively makes it possible to add ray tracing to a massive array of classic games. You can get more technical details on how it all works from Nvidia directly, and that link also shows RTX Remix mods at work in games like Morrowind and Mount & Blade. RTX Remix will require an Nvidia RTX graphics card for modders, but the resulting mods will, again, be available for any hardware that supports ray tracing through Vulkan.

There's no release date for the RTX Remix tool just yet.

These announcements came alongside official confirmation of and a pile of news about the Nvidia RTX 40 series.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.