High-tech hardware mostly optional

Wheee, I'm falling!

Portal uses the same Source engine used in all recent Valve games - with a few modifications to allow the seemingly simple, but technologically fairly complex portal mechanic. Visually Portal could be described as minimalistic. It's not ugly, it just doesn't go over the top and instead just presents the gameplay as needed. Advanced rendering effects are used in moderation to enhance gameplay, not the other way around.

Portal scales all the way down to a fairly modest minimum system, but this time we must set the YouGamers minimum spec a bit higher than with Team Fortress 2. This is due to the portals themselves; there are noticeable performance dips when both portals are in your view, even on a very high end system, and when using a very low-end system the uneven frame rate becomes an issue when pulling off time-critical moves with the Portal gun. This is doubly annoying if you start playing with a marginal system, as the game gets you going slowly, and there is no need for accurate snap shots until much later - yet portions of the game could be considered impossible unless the game stays fluid even when new Portals are opened "on the fly".

Maximum settings, playable using the YouGamers recommended setup.

Medium settings - very little changes visually.

Everything set to minimum, without any major loss in visual quality. Playable on YouGamers minimum setup.

With this in mind, the YouGamers minimum asks for an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro or NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics card as the bare minimum. Even these boards call for some downgrades in settings, but happily it doesn't really harm the game visually. In fact, it's very hard to see visual differences between different settings, as the graphics are very functional in design. Sure, you miss some minor shiny bits on some surfaces when settings are low, but it does not harm the game one bit.