A buggy mess. Do anything other than play the game and it crashes to desktop with no message. Seems very little modification was done to the Source Engine to actually get this stable, the RTX stuff was just grafted on, as when the program hangs (randomly when booting and sometimes other times too) it says 'hl2.exe has stopped responding' 💀.

I was able to play the game from start to finish fairly easily, I'm not a speed runner and Portal is not a long game but it took around 1 hour and 30 minutes (after oooing and ahhing at the new lighting effects I played it quickly as I've played the original several time), plus an extra 30 minutes to fight the random crashes and getting the performance somewhat tolerable.

Speaking of performance, at 1080p on a 3070, I was getting around 50fps. Not unplayable by any means, but this is a serious regression of performance. I hope that it's just down to the 2006 engine trying desperately to keep up, but as a tech demo that's supposed to get me excited for the future of video game graphics technology it falls flat on it's face.

This was my first real interaction with real time ray-tracing in a video game (I have dabbled with the Minecraft RTX mod for a while, but for maximum 30 mins). I am incredibility disappointed. I feel a lot of the lighting effects could be achieved the same way (or even better) through pre-rendered baking in ray-tracing. I feel like this is a serious regression and not progress. Yes it looks pretty, but for a system that supposedly has core on-board specifically for the purpose of raytracing, this is really disappointing.

However, one thing that I was charmed at was the real time lighting - which I suppose is one of the selling points of RTX. The chamber with the first energy ball was quite pretty in my opinion, and when I noticed the lighting coming through portals I was rather delighted. However, I do not honestly think that it's worth the real and serious performance impact.

Perhaps it's personal preference, but I feel like if this is the future of gaming then it's not for me. The small improvements in lighting (yes, massive improvements over the original game, but by modern lighting I don't feel like it's that much better) are not worth the performance hit, and thus price of the hardware to run such effects.

Going forward, I hope that ray-tracing stays as an optional effect in video games instead of being the only option. But maybe that increases the development time of new games, having to consider two different lighting systems, I don't know I'm not a game developer. But I really feel 90% of the effects can be recreated with pre-baked lights and the rest of the effects be ray-traced. Maybe I just don't understand this technology at all, so all I'm doing is yelling at a cloud, but it's still not ready for the main stream yet. Maybe by the next console generation, but not today. Not at 'affordable' prices.

I'd love to see how this runs on an Xbox or a PlayStation to compare the performance of PC (specifically my 3070) against consoles.

A buggy mess. Do anything other than play the game and it crashes to desktop with no message. Seems very little modification was done to the Source Engine to actually get this stable, the RTX stuff was just grafted on, as when the program hangs (randomly when booting and sometimes other times too) it says 'hl2.exe has stopped responding' 💀. I was able to play the game from start to finish fairly easily, I'm not a speed runner and Portal is not a long game but it took around 1 hour and 30 minutes (after oooing and ahhing at the new lighting effects I played it quickly as I've played the original several time), plus an extra 30 minutes to fight the random crashes and getting the performance somewhat tolerable. Speaking of performance, at 1080p on a 3070, I was getting around 50fps. Not unplayable by any means, but this is a serious regression of performance. I hope that it's just down to the 2006 engine trying desperately to keep up, but as a tech demo that's supposed to get me excited for the future of video game graphics technology it falls flat on it's face. This was my first real interaction with real time ray-tracing in a video game (I have dabbled with the Minecraft RTX mod for a while, but for maximum 30 mins). I am incredibility disappointed. I feel a lot of the lighting effects could be achieved the same way (or even better) through pre-rendered baking in ray-tracing. I feel like this is a serious regression and not progress. Yes it looks pretty, but for a system that supposedly has core on-board [i]specifically for the purpose of raytracing[/i], this is really disappointing. However, one thing that I was charmed at was the real time lighting - which I suppose is one of the selling points of RTX. The chamber with the first energy ball was quite pretty in my opinion, and when I noticed the lighting coming through portals I was rather delighted. However, I do not honestly think that it's worth the real and serious performance impact. Perhaps it's personal preference, but I feel like if this is the future of gaming then it's not for me. The small improvements in lighting (yes, massive improvements over the original game, but by modern lighting I don't feel like it's that much better) are not worth the performance hit, and thus price of the hardware to run such effects. Going forward, I hope that ray-tracing stays as an optional effect in video games instead of being the only option. But maybe that increases the development time of new games, having to consider two different lighting systems, I don't know I'm not a game developer. But I really feel 90% of the effects can be recreated with pre-baked lights and the rest of the effects be ray-traced. Maybe I just don't understand this technology at all, so all I'm doing is yelling at a cloud, but it's still not ready for the main stream yet. Maybe by the next console generation, but not today. Not at 'affordable' prices. I'd love to see how this runs on an Xbox or a PlayStation to compare the performance of PC (specifically my 3070) against consoles.