Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? In an unexpected turn of events, Valve’s beloved but aged first-person puzzle title Portal is receiving a ray tracing boost in an upcoming free update from Nvidia.
Announced during Nvidia’s GeForce Beyond show at GTC, Portal with RTX is a mod that will be available free to anyone who owns the game on Steam this November. Leveraging the power of its new RTX 40 Series cards, Nvidia has brought a level of detail to an aging game that impresses beyond belief, updating the experience with light that can bounce, reflect, and diffuse realistically across every surface in the game — even going so far as to allow light to pass through portals.
It may seem unlikely for such an old game to feel so new, but Nvidia’s update is pretty drastic, as the mod even features updates to many of the game’s flat surfaces to add more detail and depth that will allow for significantly better light reflection and shadows. This increase in polygon counts and geometric detail gives Portal an entirely new look and feel beyond the addition of ray tracing, and with such an exciting breadth of changes, it’s all but certain to entice longtime fans to dive back in.
Portal was first released in 2007 and is set in the same universe as Valve’s immensely popular Half-Life series. The game casts players as a human test subject who is tasked with testing a portal gun within a research facility — where they appear to be held against their will. Not only is it often considered among the best puzzle games ever created, one which features one of gaming’s most recognizable villains, but it even went on to spawn a meme so well-known that it transcended the gaming space altogether.
Portal‘s ray tracing update will release in November and be free to all existing owners of the game. You can put it on your wish list on Steam now.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”