News Portal RTX to Put Suitable GPUs to the Test This December, for Free

[TJ Hooker]

Given that Steam Deck display is only 1200x800 (~half the pixels of 1080p), I think it's plausible it could run this at playable fps using FSR and heavy comprimises in quality settings/rendering scale. Although at that point it may look so poor that it defeats the point of running the RT version in the first place.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Given that Steam Deck display is only 1200x800 (less than half the pixels of 1080p), I think it's plausible it could run this at playable fps using FSR and heavy comprimises in quality settings/rendering scale. Although at that point it may look so poor that it defeats the point of running the RT version in the first place.

I'll tell you this: The RX 6500 XT, which has over three times the theoretical compute power of the APU in a Steam Deck, is almost entirely incapable of providing a decent gaming experience with complex ray tracing. Minecraft RTX? It gets 17 fps at minimum settings and 1080p. Minecraft ought to be less complex than Portal, so yeah, it's going to be rough. Granted, 1280x800 is half as many pixels as 1920x1080, so maybe a 6500 XT will manage 1280x800 at 30 fps in Minecraft. But again, that's 16 CUs, 16 Ray Accelerators, and clocks of ~2.8GHz. The Steam Deck is 8 CUs, 8 Ray Accelerators, and clocks of up to 1.6GHz. So less than 1/3 the performance of an RX 6500 XT, and real-world GPU clocks are probably going to be more like 1.3GHz (due to throttling to keep power use in check).

 

[blacknemesist]

Unpopular opinion : I actually like that the game has options that absolutely destroy even the best of the best, if future proofs them in a way, we had that with so many games but now it is a problem because of DLSS3 frame generation? Instead of Ultra go High then and when you have something that can run it native at 4k it will look even better. We got too used to try and max out everything that we have issues dealing with not being able to do it , I speak for myself of course but it seems I am far from alone on this

 

[BeedooX]

Quake II RTX has the old shareware version as a free demo available in both steam and gog.
(And probably lots of other places as well)

To be fair, I thought Quake II RTX was meh. I remember playing them all to death back in the day, I just don't think RT is enough to make me want to play it again (yet).

 

[-Fran-]

It does invalidate the point. A Steam Deck is not capable of running this. Nvidia should not waste any developer time making this compatible with hardware incapable of running it.

It doesn't, but suit yourself.

I'll tell you this: The RX 6500 XT, which has over three times the theoretical compute power of the APU in a Steam Deck, is almost entirely incapable of providing a decent gaming experience with complex ray tracing. Minecraft RTX? It gets 17 fps at minimum settings and 1080p. Minecraft ought to be less complex than Portal, so yeah, it's going to be rough. Granted, 1280x800 is half as many pixels as 1920x1080, so maybe a 6500 XT will manage 1280x800 at 30 fps in Minecraft. But again, that's 16 CUs, 16 Ray Accelerators, and clocks of ~2.8GHz. The Steam Deck is 8 CUs, 8 Ray Accelerators, and clocks of up to 1.6GHz. So less than 1/3 the performance of an RX 6500 XT, and real-world GPU clocks are probably going to be more like 1.3GHz (due to throttling to keep power use in check).

The Deck doesn't throttle, even with battery. It runs at 100% clocks all the time unless you want to limit it. You can even OC it, kind of.

This article reflects my experience: https://www.pcgamer.com/does-the-steam-deck-throttle/

As for your projections, I don't disagree, but you can get away with less quality in the Deck due to the size of the screen and subjective perception per pixel drawn. Leave shaders in high and everything else in low works just fine. Yes, RT is a completely different beast, but I'd still like to see what it is capable of; specially since there's other handhelds with better APUs on the way and it may even benefit nVidia themselves to do it if they ever want to put a Shield 2 (fat chance, yes, but one can hope). As always, the proof is in the pudding.

Regards.

 

[-Fran-]

Sneaky bump?

Portal with RTX Review - Amazing Raytracing

Valve has teamed up with NVIDIA to remaster their smash-hit Portal with ray tracing. Unlike most other titles out there, which combine rasterization and ray tracing, Portal with RTX is fully path traced, which enables astonishing realism, but also comes with a huge performance hit.

www.techpowerup.com

I wish they revisit the implementation, because that looks like garbage and it's a horrible show of how RT makes things better... Great as a selling demo of the computational RT power of the nVidia cards, but they grabbed the old clown, made the nose bigger and messed his face painting and turned the clown into Rudolph (Santa's red nosed Raindeer). That's how different the game looks in those images.

Regards.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

To be fair, I thought Quake II RTX was meh. I remember playing them all to death back in the day, I just don't think RT is enough to make me want to play it again (yet).

I totally agree with that. Quake II RTX was still brown and ugly and the gameplay feels very outdated.

That said, I played through Portal RTX on an RTX 4090. With DLSS balanced mode and Frame Generation enabled. My short thoughts:

The most interesting thing to me is that Frame Generation seems to be completely placebo FPS. Like, at 4K native you get ~22 fps in Portal RTX on 4090. Turn on FG and you get ~40 fps. But the game is still running at ~22 fps and so everything feels sluggish, even if the framerate counter says 40. So you need DLSS upscaling plus FG to get the base framerate (before FG) up to ~40. Then FG can take that to ~60. Bottom line is that to me, this makes the smoke and mirrors of FG far more discernable.

There were also some glitches with FG enabled in the preview build I played. Those might get fixed with the now-released version which has a day-0 patch.

The full path tracing looks good, the game is still fun, but it's not Portal 2, sadly. Also, for how slow the full path tracing makes the game, the visual upgrade isn't that amazing. Like, it's fine and looks quite a bit better than the original for sure... but how much of that could you get with just an overhaul of a 15 year old game engine? I don't recall seeing anything that made me think, "Oh, yeah, that's obviously ray traced and looks so much better for it!"