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Lightspeed Studios / NVIDIA have recently updated Quake II RTX, their ray-traced reimagining of id software’s old school classic. The 1.8 comes nearly two years since the last update to the game, and it brings in some fun new tricks to the game.

The Quake II RTX game engine is open source under the GPL. It features Native Linux support built on top of Q2PRO and Q2VKPT.

The main highlights in the 1.8 update are:

  • Added screen warping when underwater.
  • Added an option to shoot at the crosshair (aimfix).
  • Added new rendering projections: Panini, Stereographic, Equirectangular, Mercator.
  • Added limited compatibility with Quake 2 Remastered maps.
  • Merged lots of changes and fixes from Q2PRO.
  • Fixed various system compatibility and rendering issues.

See more in the changelog.

Quake II RTX | Release Date: 6th June 2019

Official links:

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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4 comments Subscribe

Lanz a day ago
Fantastic. The Remaster has some quality content being made for it.
axredneck a day ago
I wish they merge it with Remaster somehow...
Calinou a day ago
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I wish they merge it with Remaster somehow...

The remaster's Kex engine is proprietary, while Q2PRO (and therefore Quake 2 RTX) is GPL-licensed. Therefore, this can't happen.

What can be done (and has been done with Q2REPRO) is to backport all the remaster functionality to Q2PRO. Q2REPRO lets you have the remastered experience but with a GPL-licensed source port. I believe Quake 2 RTX already started taking code from it, although some of the changes require multiplayer servers to also be running updated versions (especially the increased tick rate).
rea987 a day ago
I sincerely hope that this means I can play the new Q2 chapter natively!

Edit: To my despair, just as the update logs say, Quake II RTX's support for Quake Quake II Enhanced's new maps is limited. It can can load some of the Call of the Machine maps but additional weapons from Quake and Quake II expansions appear to be missing. I even tried to load Nintendo 64 ports opening map, it loads and plays fine but end level trigger seems to be broken.

Sigh, I guess I will wait more...


Last edited by rea987 on 1 Apr 2025 at 9:31 pm UTC
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