Portal is getting a free 4K remaster with ray tracing, releasing very soon

There are few video games as iconic as Portal and its sequel. Valve’s puzzle-platformer has had a huge impact on pop culture over the years, and it’s genuinely difficult to find anyone who’s not played it. People have been wondering for what feels like forever now if we’ll ever get Portal 3 - series writer Erik Wolpaw recently expressed interest in it himself. At the time of writing though, no such game is known to exist - a short title set in the Portal universe, Aperture Desk Job, was released alongside the Steam Deck earlier this year, but that’s about it.

Thankfully though, there’s still plenty of love for Portal around. In September, it was announced that Lightspeed Studios and NVIDIA were working on Portal with RTX, a “re-imagined” version of the 2007 game, complete with ray tracing and souped-up graphics. What’s not to love? Today, the release date has been announced, and it’s right around the corner.

Check out Portal with RTX in action below.

“Every frame of gameplay is upgraded with stunning full ray tracing, new, hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures, and new, enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals,” a press release reads. “To achieve the stunning new look, Portal with RTX utilises a suite of demanding graphics techniques that are accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS technology. DLSS 3 allows 40 Series GPU users to get over a 2.8X increase in performance, making the game incredibly smooth and responsive compared to native rendering, while 30 series GPU users will benefit from DLSS 2, bringing the game to a playable experience.”

For those who already own the original game on Steam, Portal with RTX is being released as free official DLC, so that you can mod the 2007 game to look better than ever before. It’s releasing on 8 December, which if you can believe it, is just next week. Where has the year gone?