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

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NVIDIA have announced that Quake II RTX, the ray-traced remaster of Quake II is going to release in full with Linux support on June 6th. They've said that anyone will be able to download it and try out the first three levels for free. If you own Quake II, you will be able to play through the campaign in full and play against others online.

They also have a new trailer to show off:

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Additionally, the full source code will also be posted up on GitHub. This release will come with a ton of other improvements they noted like new dynamic environments, time of day options, new weapon models and textures, dynamic lighting on various objects, a high-quality screenshot mode, support for the older OpenGL renderer (the main game uses Vulkan), multiplayer support and so on.

Minimum system requirements:

  • OS: Windows 7 64-bit or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit
  • Processor: Intel Core i3-3220, or AMD equivalent
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, or higher
  • Storage: 2GB available space

Really nice to see Linux on such equal footing here, getting support at exactly the same time. This pleases me.

You can see the original announcement here. If you want to grab a copy of the full game to be ready with the content, you can grab it on the Humble Store.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: FPS, NVIDIA, Vulkan | Apps: Quake II RTX
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poke86 May 27, 2019
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Nice, something to throw at my new 2080 ^^
Ehvis May 27, 2019
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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?
toojays May 27, 2019
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
ixo May 27, 2019
no RTX in my comp, should i play it ?


Last edited by ixo on 27 May 2019 at 10:23 am UTC
lqe5433 May 27, 2019
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Will it work also with AMD?
lqe5433 May 27, 2019
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Quoting: Guest
Quoting: ixono RTX in my comp, should i play it ?
Quoting: lqe5433Will 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?
Ehvis May 27, 2019
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Quoting: lqe5433Every 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.
wvstolzing May 27, 2019
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I wonder if it's possible to do the same on Quake I.
fabertawe May 27, 2019
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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.
appetrosyan May 27, 2019
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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.
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