Here you possibly can obtain Quake II RTX, the legendary 1997 sport with added real-time ray traced international illumination and reflections, dynamic direct and oblique lighting results, mimicked bodily materials gentle reflection properties, and volumetric lighting results.
id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing players a brand new single-player marketing campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we performed for years on pitifully-slow 56Okay modems, and a jaw-dropping engine that supported 3DFX GPU acceleration out of the field. Colored lighting, dynamic visible results, and rather more, all operating at a wonderful 640×480, or maybe 800×600 in case you had top-of-the-line {hardware}.
Fast ahead to 2001, when id Software made the Quake II engine open supply, enabling anybody to legally launch whole conversions with full engine overhauls. Ever since, followers have beavered away on their very own private tasks, the most recent of which is Q2VKPT.
Released in January, Q2VKPT was created by former NVIDIA intern Christoph Schied, a Ph.D. pupil on the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The “PT” in its identify stands for Path Tracing, a compute-intensive ray tracing method that unifies all lighting results (shadows, reflections, et cetera) right into a single ‘pure ray tracing algorithm’. With Ray Tracing being all the fad, phrase of a developer making a phenomenal, real-time ray-traced model of Quake II made headlines all over the world.
But path tracing has a draw back: its random sampling algorithm introduces ‘noise’ that makes gameplay seem grainy and speckled, as seen in 2016’s Q2PT. To resolve the issue, Christoph and his college colleagues constructed upon concepts initially conceived in 2016 throughout his NVIDIA internship, when he co-invented a quick option to take away stated graininess by combining the outcomes of a number of sport frames, in a way just like that utilized by Temporal Anti-Aliasing.
As Christoph states on his web site, Q2VKPT is the idea for future analysis, and a platform for extra ray tracing goodness. So, we reached out shortly after Q2VKPT’s launch to ask if our personal ray tracing specialists, lots of whom he labored with beforehand, might develop enhancements and main additions. He stated sure, and this week NVIDIA is presenting the newly-created Quake II RTX along with Christoph at GDC 2019.
Running on a Vulkan renderer, with assist for Linux, Quake II RTX is a pure ray-traced sport. That means all lighting, reflections, shadows and VFX are ray-traced, with no conventional results or methods utilized.
“But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. Loads. We’ve launched real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with correct daylight and oblique illumination; refraction on water and glass; emissive, reflective and clear surfaces; regular and roughness maps for added floor element; particle and laser results for weapons; procedural atmosphere maps that includes mountains, sky and clouds, that are up to date when the time of day is modified; a flare gun for illuminating darkish corners the place enemies lurk; an improved denoiser; SLI assist (hands-up in case you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI again within the day); Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, fashions and textures; elective NVIDIA Flow hearth, smoke and particle results, and rather more!
Limitations:
1.4.0 (December 15th, 2020)
New Features:
Added assist for remaining Vulkan Ray Tracing API. The sport can now run on any GPU supporting ‘VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline’ extension
Added temporal upscaling, or TAAU, for improved picture high quality at decrease decision scales.
Fixed Issues:
Fixed a crash that occurred when there aren’t any accessible sound gadgets.
Fixed a number of points with the tone mapper and the profiler for AMD GPU compatibility.
Fixed a server crash: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/86
Fixed black supplies and a few gentle leaks: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/55
Fixed lacking railgun lights in picture mode: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/75
Fixed lacking solar gentle on geometry with invalid clusters.
Fixed the CFLAGS for MinSizeRel and RelWithDebInfo builds to generate right debug symbols.
Fixed the sport stuttering on Linux: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/62
Fixed the difficulty with all fashions being lacking or corrupted on some maps throughout community play.
Fixed the closest filter when DRS was enabled after which disabled.
Fixed constructing the sport with GCC10 on Linux: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/80
