Quake II RTX to release June 6th, first 3 levels free for everyone and source code will be up too

Nice, something to throw at my new 2080 ^^

Something to try!

While these are nice from a tech demo perspective, I don't see the mainstream gaming going here for a long time. However, I do think partial raytracing could have some big advantages. The most impressive uses I've seen so far were where they did lighting calculations using RTX, while rendering the scene using the traditional way. I have no idea how exactly they do that, but I suspect that they use a variation on deferred shading where only the lighting buffer is filled by using raytracing. This could help a lot with the transitions between dark and light areas.

Any rendering tech people in here that know more?

Remembering the intro to Quake 2 still gives me shivers. I had two copies of Quake 2 back in the day (one came free with a 56k modem IIRC), hopefully I still have one of them. Otherwise I guess 3 levels will probably be enough for me anyway.


Last edited by toojays on 27 May 2019 at 10:13 am UTC

no RTX in my comp, should i play it ?


Last edited by ixo on 27 May 2019 at 10:23 am UTC

Will it work also with AMD?

no RTX in my comp, should i play it ?

Will it work also with AMD?

I don't think there is any benefit if someone don't has an RTX card like any AMD user or the wide range of NVidia GTX users IF the game even starts.
Because afaik it makes use of the Vulkan ray traced extensions only working on RTX cards.

But I thinks it's a good question, is there any fallback for non RTX users? Something like a still fancy but not ray traced experience? o.o

Every Vulkan extension is open source, no?

Every Vulkan extension is open source, no?

The specification is open, the implementation depends on who implemented it. In this case, VK_NV_ray_tracing is (as far as I know) only implemented in the proprietary nvidia driver and therefore closed. But there's nothing stopping people from implementing it in mesa and making it work for AMD through compute shaders (just like the nvidia did with the optix system before rtx, and probably still does as fallback). However, I'm not sure anyone will bother trying this in mesa since the specification will probably change before it becomes a generic vulkan extension.

I wonder if it's possible to do the same on Quake I.

I loved this on the PS1 and would love to play it (RTX) on my Linux desktop but I can't see me ditching my GTX 970 until it packs up. Or I win the lottery. It looks gorgeous though.

Here's the beauty of openSource. If Id Software hadn't released the code as GPL, their current contract with AMD would make this if not impossible, then unlikely.

Another good news, is that even if RTX cards are the only currently capable of running this at 60Hz, both AMD and Nvidia non-RTX cards would be able to run this in the future.

I was able to run(with bad performance, but that is a different matter) Q2VKPT on my laptop with a GTX 1070 because they extended the support for the ray tracing extensions to GTX cards in a recent driver update. I found a news post about it here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-418.52.05-Released

*Cries in AMD*

You can't RTX in AMD, but RTX is an NVidia proprietary API.
Just do plain pathtracing with AMD, it should perform better.
http://amietia.com/q2pt.html
I assume there is probably a generic vulkan version to with a denoiser.

*Cries in AMD*

You can't RTX in AMD, but RTX is an NVidia proprietary API.
Just do plain pathtracing with AMD, it should perform better.
http://amietia.com/q2pt.html
I assume there is probably a generic vulkan version to with a denoiser.

Going by the screenshots on that website port has no denoising, is that right?

You can't RTX in AMD, but RTX is an NVidia proprietary API.

Just like CUDA vs OpenCL, this is so typical of NVIDIA to push their proprietary APIs.

I hope that this will not become the norm. I'd really hate to see the world when you would need to choose your games based on what vendor of GPU you installed.

Just like CUDA vs OpenCL, this is so typical of NVIDIA to push their proprietary APIs.

RTX is not an api, it's just a name for the hardware acceleration. The api is the Vulkan extension.

Just like CUDA vs OpenCL, this is so typical of NVIDIA to push their proprietary APIs.

RTX is not an api, it's just a name for the hardware acceleration. The api is the Vulkan extension.

Is the specification for the extension open or closed/proprietary?

Just like CUDA vs OpenCL, this is so typical of NVIDIA to push their proprietary APIs.

RTX is not an api, it's just a name for the hardware acceleration. The api is the Vulkan extension.

Is the specification for the extension open or closed/proprietary?

The specification is open as are all Khronos registered extensions. The only implementation so far is in the nvidia proprietary driver and therefore closed. I don't think that will change any time soon.

Just like CUDA vs OpenCL, this is so typical of NVIDIA to push their proprietary APIs.

RTX is not an api, it's just a name for the hardware acceleration. The api is the Vulkan extension.

Is the specification for the extension open or closed/proprietary?

The specification is open as are all Khronos registered extensions. The only implementation so far is in the nvidia proprietary driver and therefore closed. I don't think that will change any time soon.

Well is that really Nvidia's fault then?

The specification is open as are all Khronos registered extensions. The only implementation so far is in the nvidia proprietary driver and therefore closed. I don't think that will change any time soon.

Well is that really Nvidia's fault then?[/quote]
Not really. Nvidia is simply the only one that provides the hardware acceleration. Without the RTX, it just not fast enough for realtime stuff. And since the spec will probably go through revisions before it is accepted as a non-vendor extension, other systems will just wait it out for now.

There is the generic Crytek demo shown earlier this year, but that's a bit vague on what it actually does. It may just be hype and unsuitable for practical applications.

The specification is open as are all Khronos registered extensions. The only implementation so far is in the nvidia proprietary driver and therefore closed. I don't think that will change any time soon.

Well is that really Nvidia's fault then?

Not really. Nvidia is simply the only one that provides the hardware acceleration. Without the RTX, it just not fast enough for realtime stuff. And since the spec will probably go through revisions before it is accepted as a non-vendor extension, other systems will just wait it out for now.

There is the generic Crytek demo shown earlier this year, but that's a bit vague on what it actually does. It may just be hype and unsuitable for practical applications.[/quote]
I don't think I saw that CryTek demo, got a link?