NVIDIA has announced that Portal: Prelude RTX, a fully ray-traced remaster of the highest-rated Portal mod of all time with DLSS 3, is now available as a free download on Steam. This title is the first to feature support for RTX IO, a new GPU-accelerated storage technology from NVIDIA that promises faster texture loading times and more. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will also feature support for RTX IO when it launches on July 26.
Portal: Prelude RTX is remastered with full ray tracing (also known as path tracing), DLSS 3, Reflex and the newly-launched NVIDIA RTX IO to deliver an even more immersive experience for gamers. It also features hundreds of new, fully upgraded materials and assets from David “Kralich” Driver-Gomm and Valerios “Fearell_Val” Tsoumpas, new voice acting by Jack “Amicus” McDade and Colin “SordidSpectacle” Zachariasen, and gameplay improvements from Nicolas. Portal: Prelude RTX is the definitive way to play the award winning mod.
NVIDIA RTX IO dramatically increases IO bandwidth by letting compressed data be delivered to GPU memory with minimal staging in the CPU system memory. The GPU is utilized for decompression using GDeflate at high throughput, allowing the CPU to perform other tasks. As a result, object pop-in and stutter can be reduced, and high-quality textures can be streamed at incredible rates, so even if you’re speeding through a world, everything runs and looks great. In addition, with lossless compression, game download and install sizes can be reduced, allowing gamers to store more games on their SSD while also improving their performance.
Discussion (10 replies)
Join Discussion →Look everyone Nvidia made their own version of direct storage because.... why not?
It's not their own version, it is just software to optimize DirectStorage for use on NVIDIA hardware, particularly on Lovelace. It's similar to what RTX is to DXR.
I guess that makes more sense. I just... I guess I'm having trouble seeing how Nvidia will make storage calls faster than direct.
It's not the storage calls, it's the GPU-side decompression that leverages NVIDIA hardware in RTX IO. I haven't been able to find a white paper, so I don't know how exactly it works, but it sounds like they're just using any idle cores for decompression. They say that it scales with the number of cores available, so that is just a guess.
Huh, I'm not familiar with Portal: Prelude.
Must be a new title. Half-life 3 confirmed.
It was a mod originally released in 2008. It's basically as big as the original game.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, I was just about to post that video! It was uploaded to YT 12 minutes ago, gawd d4mn you are fast! Haven't seen it yet though.
Also here is the related article: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-portal-prelude-rtx-brings-a-classic-source-mod-to-the-forefront-of-graphics-technology
Phew, that 0.3 seconds - the best investment I've ever made.