Quake II Reimagined with Ray-tracing on Vulkan

[btarunr]

Christoph Schied reimagined the 1990s cult-classic "Quake II" with real-time ray-tracing, using the Vulkan API and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series hardware exposing the "VK_NV_ray_tracing" extension. Called "Q2VKPT," this game based on id Software's open-source Quake II code, implemented real-time path-tracing to make the lighting more physically accurate. NVIDIA expanded on Schied's work with "Quake II RTX," which is possibly the world's first game that is fully real-time ray-traced.

This NVIDIA rendition of Q2VKPT leverages NVIDIA's RTX for Vulkan to ensure all lighting, shadows, reflections, and other visual effects are ray-traced and denoised using NVIDIA's AI-accelerated denoiser. Unless it somehow scored higher-resolution texture assets from id Software, NVIDIA could also be using a GPU-accelerated upscaler to improve texture resolution. It's also possible that ambient-occlusion methods such as HBAO+ are in play to add apparent geometric detail to some of the surfaces in the game. NVIDIA hasn't made Quake II RTX public yet, although you could take the path-traced Q2VKPT for a spin. You'll need an RTX 20-series graphics card and the latest drivers.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[kastriot]

Good to see it here it's a old news really but at least it's posted.

 

[wolf]

I saw this a couple of months ago, but not the part where;

NVIDIA expanded on Schied's work with "Quake II RTX,"

Perhaps they added some optimization and polish? who knows.

 

[btarunr]

Good to see it here it's a old news really but at least it's posted.

Quake II RTX was demoed last night. Q2VKPT is old.

 

[londiste]

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-tracing-vulkan-vkray-geforce-rtx/

“But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. A lot. We’ve introduced

• real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight and indirect illumination;
• refraction on water and glass;
• emissive, reflective and transparent surfaces;
• normal and roughness maps for added surface detail;
• particle and laser effects for weapons;
• procedural environment maps featuring mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed;
• a flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk;
• an improved denoiser;
• SLI support (hands-up if you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI back in the day);
• Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures;
• optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects,
• and much more!

 

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

So we need to go back to Quake2 levels of detail to get playable fully raytraced games.. sweet.

 

[Tartaros]

So we need to go back to Quake2 levels of detail to get playable fully raytraced games.. sweet.

I personally don't mind at all. It's a good excuse to revisit old games.

 

[londiste]

So we need to go back to Quake2 levels of detail to get playable fully raytraced games.. sweet.

It is not that simple. Raytracing scales differently. Q2VKPT creator said geometric complexity is not the main problem. I remember him saying in an interview that shaders (=effects) are much bigger problem when scaling.

While it is true that Quake II is a relatively old game with rather low geometric complexity, the limiting factor of path tracing is not primarily raytracing or geometric complexity. In fact, the current prototype could trace many more rays without a notable change in frame rate. The computational cost of the techniques used in the Q2VKPT prototype mainly depend on the number of (indirect) light scattering computations and the number of light sources.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Now everything looks like plastic...

 

[Vayra86]

I have to say this is a great showcase. Simple games we already know and can compare to.

So we need to go back to Quake2 levels of detail to get playable fully raytraced games.. sweet.

What's not to like? They can drop the seasons, DLC and MTX along with it, ain't got time for that, gotta shoot things.

 

[xtreemchaos]

Wow Quake that brings back memorys, looks good to me im up for it.

 

[mouacyk]

While Q2VKPT ran fine on a 1080Ti, it is very noisy, obviously due to the lack of a hardware de-noiser. That's where NVidia's RTX version comes in -- it de-noises the final image, and provides dedicated acceleration for the ray tracing. They've proven their point here, that you need specialized hardware (RTX) to get a complete final image in real-time.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Ah Q2, I made over a dozen MP levels for that game, and who knows how many hours I spent fragging. There was actually an updated texture pack made for the DM 1-8 levels, so I would be curious to see how those would look with the RT engine.

 

[jabbadap]

Quake II RTX was demoed last night. Q2VKPT is old.

Well it's same thing developed further with cooperation between Nvidia and original author. And where to heck you would need HBAO+, when you have RT GI Makes no sense what so ever.

I personally don't mind at all. It's a good excuse to revisit old games.

Yeah, I don't mind either. Would love to see someone do RTCW the same.

 

[ZoneDymo]

love it, do this with all early 3d games pls.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Seriously, I want Quake 1 re-done with this. And to include the 4K textures and high poly mods too please.

 

[Basard]

Digging this up a few days later.... The videos here kind of annoyed me, seems more like they ruined Quake 2 somehow.

 

[Tartaros]

Seriously, I want Quake 1 re-done with this. And to include the 4K textures and high poly mods too please.

That's the best thing about ID software games, this is not some wishful thinking and surely someone is on it atm. I haven't played Hexen 2, might go directly to this.