You call it "complex ray tracing" I call it "marketing", aka "tanking performance on purpose" to sell your new product and sabotage competition; Nvidia did this so many times we lost the count. The Portal RTX trailers are really underwhelming graphic wise but you expect me to believe it's actually more demanding than open world games like Minecraft RTX or Cyberpunk Psycho ? C'mon.. no need to be naive here.
Everybody likes Portal, it's an instant sell as a remaster with pretty lights, they took it and stamped on it "only on RTX4000 series". If 20fps is all a 4090 can do then the 3080 can do what, 10? The 3060 gets 5? Lol. Ok lower the resolution to 1080p, now the 3060 can maybe get into the 30s with DLSS2? You kidding me? I'm all in for a game like TES6 show up with such high graphical blings that a 4060 runs it 30fps average, the new Crysis of this generation. But a old old old game that plays inside a room??? C'mon.. if this game can't run 60fps on a 3060 maxed out at 1080p native you should know something is fishy. It's. Inside. A. Room. FGS
No need to be blind as to what ray tracing means, either, or to conflate 4K native performance with lower resolutions.
If you're doing ray tracing, you have to do ray/box and ray/triangle intersection calculations for every ray. The more complex the ray tracing, the more rays are involved. Really good simulated effects for shadows and lighting can at least get relatively close to approximating RT quality, so the gains are smaller. Reflections are still the one area where stuff like SSR fails to come anywhere close to RT in a lot of situations. So, when I say "complex ray tracing" and the game is doing "full path tracing," yeah... that's going to be very complex and costly.
It's the same thing Nvidia did for Minecraft and Quake II, but in a more complex environment and with more ray bounces. Perhaps that's just to make it more demanding, perhaps there's also people who want to see the maximum RT quality possible. I'm also curious as to what can be disabled to tone down the requirements. Because while it might be somewhat interesting to do tests with maxed out settings, I'd also like to see what more modest settings can do.
If RTX 4090 gets 20 fps at 4K max settings and native resolution, it would likely get in the 60-70 fps range at 1080p native. Which means a 3080 would be down to 30-35 fps maybe, and DLSS could bump that up 50% or more. And a 3060 would be in the 20 fps range but could get a bump up to 30+ fps. And if you can turn down the number of ray bounces and such, then maybe that gets the 3060 back to 60 fps. But we shall soon see how it runs, and whether the quality is worth the cost.
And if you already have a 40-series, it's free. If you don't have a 40-series...
it's also free. Will some people buy a 40-series just so they can get better Portal RTX performance? Perhaps, but I suspect the number of people who upgrade solely due to this one RTX Remix game will be extremely small. There are people on the fence who might, but those fence sitters were probably going to upgrade eventually regardless of cost. Also note that Portal RTX is more a proof of concept, so we may see a lot more "remix" games getting RT support in the coming year.
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