Portal 2 looks mighty tasty indeed with RTX Remix

Portal 2 seems like a lifetime ago, now. It released all the way back in 2011 and was the last (and just the second) time Valve took us on a journey through its puzzle-based game with the sardonic robot antagonist. It’s a shame we never got a third entry, as it feels like there’s still so much to explore. Still, we can always make what we have look shinier.

As noted by , you can now play Portal 2 via Nvidia’s RTX Remix software, which gives the game full Path and Ray Tracing features. To put it simply (because I don’t understand how the tech works myself), it boosts the lighting and overall visuals, making you go “ooh, shiny,” throughout.

You can download the mod – which was created by user xoxor4d – from . However, it should be noted that this is still a work in progress. The description on the download page says RTX Remix was “never intended to support Portal 2.” As such, you may encounter one or two bugs or a few crashes, so do bear that in mind before you install it.

Remixing the classics

Here a༺re the features for the RTX Remix compatibility mod of th🍎e game:

• Most things are rendered using the fixed-function pipeline.
• Remix friendly culling and the ability to manually override culling per .
• Per map loading of remix config files to set remix variables.
• Spawning of unique anchor meshes.

As you can see from the video above, Portal 2 looks pretty striking. To be fair, even though it’s been 13 years since it was released, the vanilla experience still holds up, but if you can get it running through Nvidia’s toolkit, you’ll definitely notice the visual differences.

Nvidia launched the beta of RTX Remix at the start of this year. Since then, modders have been using it to inject a bit of Ray Tracing goodness into some classic games, including The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, GTA: Vice City, Half-Life 2, Tomb Raider, and even the original Unreal.

We also got an official release of an RTX Remix version of the first Portal back in 2022, which looked stunning. However, it w✱as notable for requiring a mu🎃ch beefier system to run when compared to the standard game.

According to the , it even recommends a GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card and 32GB of RAM if you want to play it on “Ultra” settings. Maybe that’s one of the reasons it has a review score of “Mixed.”