More like intentionally made to run as atrociously as possible. There is nothing remarkable visually speaking in it compared to other more complex games that have RT and actually manage to run at a decent framerate, I don't know how anyone can make the case that the performance hit is in any way justifiable on a basic game like Portal. Not to mention that such conversions on old games are incredibly misleading because you can achieve 90% of the same look with modern non RT techniques and once you become aware of that you realize just how ridiculous this is.
If the cutting edge of RT is making a 15 year old game look modern while obliterating anything reassembling a playable framerate on 99% of the available hardware we're in for a rough ride.
This.
Raster is there for a reason: it was hyper efficient. Efficient enough to look pretty great, add lots of dynamic effects to the scene, and
still run on a potato.
Nvidia however likes to sell a new potato every other year. And since RTX, at astronomical price tags. We've just seen a discussion happen where a 2060 (!) user couldn't properly run RT content, even if its only two generations away and among the scarce cards that can even run it to begin with. Then we get a misguided tour through Nvidia land where '40 series can run it fine' even though the stack contains only north of 1K$ GPUs that are the worst perf/$ since forever. Then, when its unavoidable to deny this won't quite help adoption, a 'research paper turned into a game' that is only one year in the past is suddenly grounds for helping that adoption rate. You couldn't make it up, but sound logic it is not.
Somebody really drank too much kool aid here. And is being pretty arrogant about it too when proven wrong by reality checks. As a staff member, I might add, and as another event in a long series of examples. Tone of voice: disgusting and oozing gullible fool caught by marketing. The guy should start a YT channel - TPU is not his place clearly. Any content he spews is clearly tainted by confirmation bias. I'd prefer to stay far away from reading it.
'I'm right, you're wrong' he says, when there is clear evidence in the market that RT adoption is not happening at any reasonable rate. The consoles aren't even pushing it and cards that run it have extremely low market penetration. And that was due to the days of free & crypto money, whereas now, people are looking at >10% of inflation YoY. Good luck pushing nonsensically heavy processing feature sets when people are happy they can make ends meet. Enjoy those research papers and PoCs, that's about as far as it'll go. Much like VR - it simply prices itself out of the market.
Now excuse me while I push 3440x1440 on a GTX 1080 at 60~100 fps in pretty much all I want to play.
Then maybe people with hardware that can only run it in a slideshow could have a big think as to why they might be unimpressed.
Its called common sense, try it someday. I see RT side by side with raster scenes and I just can't find any reason to justify the expense. I've been here before, pretty much every gen Nvidia pushes a new proprietary trick, and every time, it wasn't worth jumping into; Hairworks, PhysX, Turf Effects, HBAO+, MLAA, it was all completely not necessary and the market didn't carry it. They're gimmicks, and only when they become ubiquitous, is when they start to matter. And they get there, when the market is saturated with cards that can run it just fine. Thát is when devs are truly convinced. Right now its like a crypto ICO, no more, no less, and you're just doing missionary work for someone else. And, again, the writings are on the economic walls: a have/have not situation is not going to help RT adoption, but its exactly where we're at.
And you know what happens when the market does carry it? You get the Gsync situation: Nvidia is forced to retract their turd because their whole business approach fell flat just like that. 'Pushing RT' the way Nvidia does ever since Turing is really not going places unless the products are accessible. The fact Nvidia is increasing margins 'while pushing the industry' is a completely nonsensical shift as well, it directly counters their attempts to move RT forward. Gosh, I wonder why? Maybe you will figure it out someday, big thinker.
'Moore's Law is Dead, (because we created RTX)' - Huang, 2022.