Portal 2 Forum

Portal 2 runs pretty much perfectly for me on my M1 2020 MacBook Air... except for when looking through a portal. A whole bunch of graphical glitches happen for me, models disappearing, models appearing black or white, models with incorrect transform/rotation, and models cycle through these glitches depending on the angle at which I look through the portal. Has anyone else encountered this and can anyone give some insight as to why this might be happening?

Before walking through portal:

After walking through portal:

Many people (even me) have had issues with weird portal glitches that appear like broken windows caused by Vulkan/DirectX, try switching them.
But your case seems weird, try playing around with the video detail settings, especially the shaders.
My last bet is typing "mat_specular 0" into the console, then I'm out of the loop...

Hope it helps :)

Here's an image showing way more glitchyness

Let me (and others) know what eventually helped, I'm curious

No luck :(

The first thing you said to try I probably didn't do correctly though- I enabled DXVK from the advanced settings for my Steam bottle, but I'm not sure if that's what you meant, sorry.

After that I tried messing with all the advanced video settings in Portal 2 a bunch, basically went through every combination one by one, but with every configuration, I was still seeing those graphical bugs through portals.

Last one I don't really understand either- I ran it, but, no change. (I assumed it was set to 1 before, so I ran mat_specular 1 after I ran mat_specular 0 and saw no change to revert it.)

Here, I made a video that better shows how this looks while playing:
https://youtu.be/V6VPWDjjUcg

Vulkan is enabled by Steam Library -> Portal 2 -> Right Click -> Properties -> Launch Options -> add parameter "-vulkan" (without the dashes).
Alternatively, I remember few years ago when installing CrossOver, some tutorial guy on YouTube told me to download something like "DirectX libraries", which if the problem is caused by DirectX would solve it 99 %. Sadly, I do not remember how I did it anymore and don't even have CrossOver installed, will do some research and post what (if) have I found.

Thanks! So I added that parameter and when the game started, it went all black (there was sound though, and moving my mouse made the sound effect that indicated I was highlighting menu items). I thought maybe I needed to add Vulkan to the Libraries section in the Wine configurator? But, that didn't make any change, so I undid that after I tried it. I didn't think Portal 2 would have a Vulkan mode since I thought Portal 2 came out before the first version of Vulkan- but I could've easily been wrong in this assumption.

Hi there,

You can try installing DirectX For Modern Games into your bottle - that might help.

Best,
Meredith

Thanks for your suggestion Meredith! No luck though, unfortunately. I installed it, started up Portal 2, loaded into my save standing in front of a portal, and it looks just as buggy as before.

My last guess would be to verify games cache, or even reinstalling it (don't forget to save your progress). Even better would be to do fresh install in fresh bottle, but I'm sure you tried it.

aujnfvkjqencalsk wrote:

My last guess would be to verify games cache, or even reinstalling it (don't forget to save your progress). Even better would be to do fresh install in fresh bottle, but I'm sure you tried it.

..alternatively, this could be just games bug. Found that NVidia users report the same problem, so probably no CrossOver specific.

Haven't said anything in a while- sorry about that!

aujnfvkjqencalsk wrote:

aujnfvkjqencalsk wrote:

My last guess would be to verify games cache, or even reinstalling it (don't forget to save your progress). Even better would be to do fresh install in fresh bottle, but I'm sure you tried it.

..alternatively, this could be just games bug. Found that NVidia users report the same problem, so probably no CrossOver specific.

The glitch shown in the reddit posts linked in the report is something else, I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen anything that looks like that-
I haven't yet tried reinstalling Portal 2... I suppose I ought to, it's just really time consuming for me since my network downloads at around 1 MB/s.

After about 2 hours, I've got it reinstalled 👍
aaaand, it made no difference...

I just installed Portal 2 today to discover the same graphics issue. I tried all the above attempts to no avail and was curious if a solution had been discovered.