We have a very interesting rumor related to Portal With RTX, and the other RTX remakes of classic games.
Our source, who goes by the handle Oops Leaks, tweeted out this statement:
“Bioshock RTX supposed to be a showcase game for NVIDIA’s Remix technology but due to performance issues this was changed to Portal RTX instead that still caused some problems even considering the smaller amount of geometry and light sources.”
A few years back, Nvidia started an interesting video game program, to highlight the capabilities of their RTX ray tracing technology, found exclusively on their graphics cards.
They tapped Lightspeed studios for these jobs, whom they had previously worked on for their ports of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Doom³: BFG Edition on the Nvidia Shield platform. The games they made for Nvidia in this round turned out to be Quake II RTX, and Portal With RTX.
Both Quake II RTX and Portal With RTX are free upgrades. If you have the game, and a computer with a capable GPU, you can download either of these as free upgrades for your base game. Portal With RTX is only available on Steam as it is one of Valve’s games, but you can get Quake II RTX DRM-free on GOGcom. Nvidia’s remaster program distinguishes itself from those made by the usual suspects like Digital Eclipse, Code Mystics, and GOG themselves. Those devs do great work upgrading older games to work in newer systems, and will often include tons of extras to upgrade their ports to virtual museums. Nvidia’s RTX ports are solely about demonstrating the ability of their ray tracing technology, but along the way, have given us excellent new versions of these two classic games that are more suitable for modern players.
The idea of a Bioshock port with RTX just seems too good to be true, in comparison. While the original Bioshock received a console generation upgrade in Bioshock: The Collection, it was a comparatively bigger and more ambitious game than either Quake II or Portal. While Rapture isn’t so big a video game world, compared to, say, the open worlds of Borderlands or Assassin’s Creed, it would have still been a taller order to remaster in RTX compared to, say, a Painkiller game.
It’s not a surprise that Nvidia decided to abandon that project, given the scale needed to make it happen. It does remain a particularly intriguing prospect for the Nvidia RTX program. Not only is the universe of Bioshock and Rapture beloved, its dark, watery, and atmospheric visuals would be an incredible showcase of ray tracing, if Nvidia and Lightspeed spent the time and money to do it right. Maybe it’s something that would be more feasible with future generations of Nvidia GEForce cards.
