A YouTuber has demonstrated how Portal 2 with a path tracing mod makes Nvidia’s high-end RTX 4080 look like a budget graphics card. GPUs still have a long way to go to become viable for fully path traced games.
YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC has put the RTX 4080 through its paces in Portal 2, showing more than a 10x frame rate drop when enabling path tracing at 4K resolution. To be exact, the GPU managed to draw just 25fps with the feature on instead of its usual 311fps when using the original shadows and reflections. While some less demanding sections allowed the card to push up to 50fps, it also dropped as low as 20fps in heavy scenes. The cherry on top is that all of this used DLSS 3.8 Performance upscaling, too. Ouch!
The YouTuber also compared performance at lower, more usable resolutions and got closer to 60fps at 1440p Balanced DLSS and above 100fps at 1080p Quality DLSS. Maybe the upcoming RTX 5080 could run it natively at 4K resolution, assuming the rumoured 10% uplift compared to the RTX 4090 is correct.
In comparison, the first Portal game ran much smoother on RTX 4080, pushing above 80fps using DLSS Performance mode. That said, part of the performance hit might rest on the optimisation of this mod, since it’s not an official build from Valve or Nvidia.
With that in mind, the visual difference is striking. If not for the ageing textures and vegetation models, you wouldn’t guess this is a 13-year-old game. I especially like the colour-bleeding effect where reflected light rays change the colour of the environment. Very noticeable when throwing blue and orange portals on walls.
If you feel your RTX graphics card isn’t struggling enough and want to give this mod a run, head to xoxor4d’s GitHub repository and follow the installation guide. Nothing too complicated, mainly just downloading and copying a bunch of files.
It’s great to see Nvidia’s RTX Remix used to bring old games into the modern era. Makes me think, where is my Red Faction Guerrilla remake? In any case, a fantastic work from xoxor4d.