Q2VKPT Brings Ray Tracing to Quake 2

GoodBoy said:
Jensen's "It just works" refers to the lighting/reflections, a statement aimed at game dev's who normally have to do all kinds of tricks to get reflections to work in rasterized games... and even then, it doesn't work 100% right. A light source coming from a player can be hidden behind the wall, but still be reflected on the floor on the opposite side of the wall... giving away your position. That doesn't happen with raytracing. Example: star wars battlefront, light saber wielding hero is waiting near a door, and you can see the saber glow on this side of the wall.. crap like that "just works" correctly when raytraced, and the light from the lightsaber isn't visible on the floor. (Jensen should have much better articulated what he meant with the whole 'It Just Works' statement.)
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Except in BFV where entire pieces of the landscape are missing in the reflections because in order to get the raytracing running at any form of acceptable performance they literally had to design a completely separate "de-res'd" version of the game world with fewer assets, lower polys and no dynamic details that the RT ACTUALLY reflects, instead of the real game environment.









Just works.
 
ok then. Specifically mentions the NV extensions under NVIDIA Corporation.

https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/
 
Mega6 said:
ok then. Specifically mentions the NV extensions under NVIDIA Corporation.

https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/
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Is this RTX hardware specific, or is there anything preventing an AMD driver from implementing this? I was under the impression that the Ray-Tracing for Vulkan was going to be platform agnostic, so it would be dissappointing if that was not the case.
 
jardows said:
Is this RTX hardware specific, or is there anything preventing an AMD driver from implementing this? I was under the impression that the Ray-Tracing for Vulkan was going to be platform agnostic, so it would be dissappointing if that was not the case.
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Vulkan is open source. AMD can use the Nv implementation calls or add their own VK extensions with their driver. You probably need the hardware for this to have reasonable FPS and AMD doesn't have that yet. (that I know of) The NV hooks just don't exist in the AMD driver, not surprisingly.
 
Is there any bounce light at all? I can't tell at the moment on my small display... the shadows and shiney textures look nice though, but overall I was expecting more even global illumination and some caustic effects... maybe because they don't cast many rays and apply a heavy averaging filter over everything?

Someone should do this with Doom 3, so we can see more dynamic lights and bounce light (and AI-upres those textures while you're at it)
 
Legendary Gamer said:
Looks pretty sweet. Almost makes me want to fire it back up. Honestly, it should be included in the Nvidia games bundle. Lol ;)... "It just works". Finally, something actually "just works". Perhaps the next step is to create Ray Traced Space Invaders :cool:
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RTX Space Invaders was the first demo. Quake 2 is the next logical progression. At this rate we can expect fully raytraced games of today released in 20 years.
 
I'd rather have RT Gyruss or Galaga than Space Invaders, but I'll take it. :p
 
It's kind of a spiritual successor to the original quake ray tracing experiment ages ago that was sub 1fps on every computer at the time.
 
mashie said:
Good to see a 20 year old game can run at playable FPS with ray tracing enabled.
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Read first.......

He explains the lighting sources are the key, which are up to modern games standards.

There are some people that actually want context in their graphics Rather han the same old same old resolution and frame increases alone. Tesselation while amazing at making a brick wall looking like a brick wall was damn near useless at first because the performance impact was godaweful.......it's new tech give it time ffs instead of being sarcastic.
 
dgz said:
Well, I think it looks pretty sweet. Frankly, actual ray-tracing is going to be huge.

The first part of this demo looked amazing, especially dark areas - wow. But there's more to be desired overall. We need some kind of deeper level light source analysis tools so that awesome old games can look amazing again. Remember, lighting is the most important part. If that looks right, everything else is secondary
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Honestly for the open world experiment Oblivion could be a great starting point or maybe even Skyrim depending on what they can do.
 
Advil said:
It's kind of a spiritual successor to the original quake ray tracing experiment ages ago that was sub 1fps on every computer at the time.
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That was very cool, I remember it well. Give this RT thing 2 mote generations and it will be awesome. Thanks to those who are willing to bankroll it, I'm not, but I do appreciate others doing it!
 
The first half looks really good, looks like a stop-animation with all that realistic lighting.
 
xp3nd4bl3 said:
Not to go off topic but it was 9 years between Quake 2 and Crysis... and it's been 13 years since Crysis...

I miss the days when every year there were dramatic leaps in games technology and firing up a 2 year old game was like "whoa this looks ancient".
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Holy jesus never thought of that. Around about crysis time things slowed right down. From crysis warhead to say bf4... There ain't much progression there. Take away physically based rendering and how far have we really come?

GoodBoy said:
You can run quake and quake 2 at full resolutions of todays' monitors.. no reason to play in 640x480, and that raytraced demo is most definitely not 640x480...
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r/woosh
 
Q2VKPT on vega 56
Found that video on reddit. Note that it has comments from 116 days ago (about 4 months), and the settings may not have been optimum. He clearly wasn't using the denoising algorithm that they used on some of the other videos.
 
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Slade said:
The lightsaber jedi example is a good concept too. I can see your lightsaber glowing off the wall, come out from that corner. No you can't see me, I'm rasterized...
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Also; - But now that you're rasterised I see you have turned to the dark side!
No father! It's just the fake ass looking ambient occlusion.
 
Tiberian said:
Honestly I think it looked much better back in the good old days when I had a 3Dfx card and their GLide support.

But then I got a Matrox G400 and that to this day produced what I still consider to be the best-looking graphics output of any card that I've ever been able to use. When Unreal (and I do mean the original Unreal which just celebrated its 20th anniversary last year) was played on a G400, good Lord, it was like an orgasm for your eyes. :D

I can appreciate the amount of time and effort that has been put into producing these revised versions of the old classic games, but as far as this one is concerned I don't think that ray tracing is going to do anything for it.
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For me it was a 4MB Mystique 220 and a PowerVR M3D card. Unreal/Quake 2 etc. looked fantastic.

I was shocked to see a M3D card sell on Ebay this week for £155 ($200)!!

I threw mine in the trash or gave it away many years ago.
 
jardows said:
They say they use the Vulkan API, so it shouldn't require an RTX card per se. Probably won't perform well right now on AMD hardware, but with the right support, Vega 2 might do it alright.
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Nope, they say they require an RTX GPU,

Q2VKPT is implemented in the Vulkan API to be able to use the new hardware-accelerated raytracing features that were made available earlier this year. Thanks to these, the game can actually come close to 60 FPS (2560x1440, RTX2080Ti),
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Vulkan, new accelerated raytracing hardware, 2080Ti.

NWRMidnight said:
They have had the Raytracing mod going for about 2+ years now (originally called Pathtracing), and it was designed to run on both AMD and Nvidia. Yes, it will run better on Nvidia RTX series cards, but the original project was designed to run on both. So Jardows is correct. The calls you listed are for Nvidia only.
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It ran with crap fps, and without a denoising filter, and without textures too. BIG difference.
 
Is there a side by side video of this? I cant find one. Would be nice to see the contrast in real time. I love how ray tracing breaths so much life into older game.
 
Its really easy to go for the obvious jokes on this one. No one is buying a 1000 dollar card for quake 2 of course. Having said that.....

There has been a healthy market for HD remakes the last few years.

Ray traced remakes of some 20+ year old classics... might actually be pretty killer. In a couple years if main stream Navi, and perhaps Nvidia ampere and even Intel gpus feature tensor hardware. There may be a good market for ray traced versions of games like quake, unreal, system shock. thief and a ton of other 90s/2000s titles.

I know most [H] readers are likely north of 30... perhaps even 40+. lol But for a lot of younger gamers... they have never played some of those classics. I imagine the companies that own the rights to some of those titles might be looking at pretty good return on investments if they where to spend a bit of time re doing them. I guess the real question would be how many of those classes have nice neat well kept source around still. lol
 
funny timing... i was just this week playing with the earlier Q2PT "Raylgun" engine they mention. after tweaking got 60fps on my 1070... at 640x480 :ROFLMAO: hella noisy obviously. imma give this a try later. Vulkan works on Win 8.1 right? i have recent 41x.xx driver
 
daglesj said:
For me it was a 4MB Mystique 220 and a PowerVR M3D card. Unreal/Quake 2 etc. looked fantastic.
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Had the exact same setup plus a Rainbow Runner analog capture card Mystique add-on. Quite the setup back in the day. I too gambled on PowerVR as it only seemed logical at the time that tile based rendering would be the future.
 
Youn said:
Someone should do this with Doom 3, so we can see more dynamic lights and bounce light (and AI-upres those textures while you're at it)
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Oh hell yeah! If there is a single game that would benefit the most by Raytracing it would be Doom 3. I mean, its rudimentary dynamic lighting and self-shadowing was kinda ground breaking and tried to give an impression of real lights and shadows, but it is also what made the game unplayable without the duct tape mod (there either was light or none at all, everything else was covered in pitch black shadow). I believe having an actual raytracing with real lights that bounce from walls and illuminate surroundings might make the game playable without mods while still looking dark and scary, shadows are getting casted where they should be and so on.
 
MaZa said:
Oh hell yeah! If there is a single game that would benefit the most by Raytracing it would be Doom 3. I mean, its rudimentary dynamic lighting and self-shadowing was kinda ground breaking and tried to give an impression of real lights and shadows, but it is also what made the game unplayable without the duct tape mod (there either was light or none at all, everything else was covered in pitch black shadow). I believe having an actual raytracing with real lights that bounce from walls and illuminate surroundings might make the game playable without mods while still looking dark and scary, shadows are getting casted where they should be and so on.
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I agree. Lights and shadows in Doom3 were not very good (well they were at the time, but not anymore).Even with all the best mods, it still looks kind of flat. I'd love to see RTX implemented in this game.
 
daglesj said:
For me it was a 4MB Mystique 220 and a PowerVR M3D card. Unreal/Quake 2 etc. looked fantastic.

I was shocked to see a M3D card sell on Ebay this week for £155 ($200)!!

I threw mine in the trash or gave it away many years ago.
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I sill have my M3D card. I don't know if it still works. Unreal, quake and Tomb Raider looked amazing on it.
 
MaZa said:
unplayable without the duct tape mod
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I recently played through it vanilla and almost never used the flashlight... maybe just a few times in the beginning level - maybe that's how far most people got before declaring the entire game was like that? some later levels were really really stunning and in general better lit

for me with Doom 3, I'd love a soft diffuse light emitting omnidirectionally from the armor... would provide better visibility than something like a flashlight which would produce sharp shadows... and also it'd look more like original doom 1/2 how things get brighter as you approach them

as far as the ultimate game to utilize RTX... Euro Lighting Designer Simulator... take that dream gig with your favorite rock group or serious gig with an architect or fulfill your artsy fartsy at moma and other playgrounds/gallaries, whatever...
 
With the way ray tracing is such a consumer of power and really just something optional. The smart thing to do would be to sell cards without raytracing and have it be able to be added with an add in card. If I could buy a 2080ti (or equal) without Ray tracing for say.. 600 bucks, then later if I wanted it add ray tracing for 400 later.. or even 150 later because it's an add in card. I would be all about it. As it stands doing it as one big Processing unit is taking away from the over all.
 
Youn said:
I recently played through it vanilla and almost never used the flashlight... maybe just a few times in the beginning level - maybe that's how far most people got before declaring the entire game was like that? some later levels were really really stunning and in general better lit

for me with Doom 3, I'd love a soft diffuse light emitting omnidirectionally from the armor... would provide better visibility than something like a flashlight which would produce sharp shadows... and also it'd look more like original doom 1/2 how things get brighter as you approach them

as far as the ultimate game to utilize RTX... Euro Lighting Designer Simulator... take that dream gig with your favorite rock group or serious gig with an architect or fulfill your artsy fartsy at moma and other playgrounds/gallaries, whatever...
Click to expand...

Well those earlier levels are probably what the people play the most and what we usually remember but you are correct. There are some well lit levels, especially the Hell which is fricking awesome level.
 
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ChadD said:
Its really easy to go for the obvious jokes on this one. No one is buying a 1000 dollar card for quake 2 of course. Having said that.....

There has been a healthy market for HD remakes the last few years.

Ray traced remakes of some 20+ year old classics... might actually be pretty killer. In a couple years if main stream Navi, and perhaps Nvidia ampere and even Intel gpus feature tensor hardware. There may be a good market for ray traced versions of games like quake, unreal, system shock. thief and a ton of other 90s/2000s titles.

I know most [H] readers are likely north of 30... perhaps even 40+. lol But for a lot of younger gamers... they have never played some of those classics. I imagine the companies that own the rights to some of those titles might be looking at pretty good return on investments if they where to spend a bit of time re doing them. I guess the real question would be how many of those classes have nice neat well kept source around still. lol
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I would definitely be the target market for that.
 
Grimlaking said:
With the way ray tracing is such a consumer of power and really just something optional. The smart thing to do would be to sell cards without raytracing and have it be able to be added with an add in card. If I could buy a 2080ti (or equal) without Ray tracing for say.. 600 bucks, then later if I wanted it add ray tracing for 400 later.. or even 150 later because it's an add in card. I would be all about it. As it stands doing it as one big Processing unit is taking away from the over all.
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Maybe DirectX 12 can provide this option of adding ray tracing via an add in card ?
 
Marees said:
Maybe DirectX 12 can provide this option of adding ray tracing via an add in card ?
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Please note I am not a programmer.

DirectX12 is simply an API. It doesn't give a crap where the API calls for information are coming from or what is delivering the info. It either has the info to pass or it does not.
 
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