Quake II Rtx coming out June 6th, 2019

Valve has publicly stated that they'd essentially allow customers to download their libraries and continue to play them.

Of course, we don't know what that would look like, but that's as good of a guarantee that you're going to get for anything.

It's a nice thought, though there's no way I'd be able to download and store even 1/4 of my Steam library.


How? If the company no longer exists there no money to pay for those servers to host the games for people to download. There would have to be some other company to host the games and there gona have to have some sort of income coming in to want to host those games.


What I hope Valve are doing is putting away some billions of dollars into an account that would serve to fund Steam hosting service should Valve ever stop functioning as a business. Valve generate the income to make that possible, I hope it's something they'd do.

I also hope that Valve will not go out of business but will stay around until a point in the future where all old games can be put under a public license and downloaded freely from some archival service. Something of a non-profit consortium-managed public resource archive, where all old games are automatically sent to after a certain amount of time.
 
Releasing on Steam? Gross. As always, no Physical, no buy.
They're releasing an executable that will install to wherever you have Quake II installed. Meaning you can have the original game installed from CD and it will install to that.
Yup and it sucks cause the pc boxes I've collected and sold years ago were awesome as the few I still have.

The sad part is once you get rid of the console you dont have the games anymore. Cant sell the games. Cant package the console with the games like in the past.

Heres a scary thought.. what happens when steam goes belly up? Were's all our games? Nothing. No physical box to look at to bring all those memories back years later.. cant okay the game anymore. Dont have a copy.
The funny thing is that the way Microsoft was initially planning the Xbox One you could trade and sell digital games. But everyone got so pissed about the always online restriction that Microsoft scrapped that plan. Thanks, internet. As always, you ruin everything.
 
Releasing on Steam? Gross. As always, no Physical, no buy.

Nothing wrong with Steam. Once you have purchased, downloaded, and launched a game at least once while online, it is then available to play offline. You mentioned "what happens if they go belly up", but games on steam, especially older ones, are often $5 or less. So assuming something did happen and you lost your online library, its not always the same $$ compared to physical copies.

The physical copies are not only going away for PC games, but for consoles as well. Already, some games are only available in the online stores.

I prefer the physical copies as well, but even when you do get a physical copy, they often require an internet connection to work (drm), so if that game developer goes belly up, your physical copy might become non-functional (same as your concern with Steam). If you want to wait 3 to 10 years, good games eventually make their way to Gog. So no DRM, but also no physical copy. But the nice thing about Gog and Steam is that some really old games that were not compatible with Windows past say Windows 98 or Windows XP, are updated to be fully compatible with current Windows, some even ported to Linux. It can be the only way to play some old games without having a 386 running Windows 95. So the physical copy becomes non-functional collector item. but I like to play my old games sometimes. All the favorites have been repurchased on steam or Gog.

As far as Quake II goes, you can install the RTX mod manually on your existing game install. It's a separate executable, so if your pc can't handle it, just use the original shortcut/executable and play it without RTX.
 
More excited about this than any other RTX title yet.
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I feel you, old-timer.
 
Nothing wrong with Steam. Once you have purchased, downloaded, and launched a game at least once while online, it is then available to play offline. You mentioned "what happens if they go belly up", but games on steam, especially older ones, are often $5 or less. So assuming something did happen and you lost your online library, its not always the same $$ compared to physical copies.

The physical copies are not only going away for PC games, but for consoles as well. Already, some games are only available in the online stores.

I prefer the physical copies as well, but even when you do get a physical copy, they often require an internet connection to work (drm), so if that game developer goes belly up, your physical copy might become non-functional (same as your concern with Steam). If you want to wait 3 to 10 years, good games eventually make their way to Gog. So no DRM, but also no physical copy. But the nice thing about Gog and Steam is that some really old games that were not compatible with Windows past say Windows 98 or Windows XP, are updated to be fully compatible with current Windows, some even ported to Linux. It can be the only way to play some old games without having a 386 running Windows 95. So the physical copy becomes non-functional collector item. but I like to play my old games sometimes. All the favorites have been repurchased on steam or Gog.

As far as Quake II goes, you can install the RTX mod manually on your existing game install. It's a separate executable, so if your pc can't handle it, just use the original shortcut/executable and play it without RTX.

No. I never asked what would happen if Steam went belly up, nor do I care. There was no need for you to lie. It just makes it impossible for me to try and take you seriously.
 
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Quake is supposed to be a dark place. For the RTX purpose it has been all lighten up. Looks good but not Quake anymore.
 
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Quake is supposed to be a dark place. For the RTX purpose it has been all lighten up. Looks good but not Quake anymore.

By lighting the game up properly, it'd be possible to make the game even darker. HDR support would help too, these technologies can go hand in hand.

HDR RT Quake I / II on an OLED?
 
Someone, get on that. (psst nVidia).i
You forgot Doom 1/2, Wolfenstein 3D, and their clones... would be more of a challenge to determine correct 3d lighting, but I can think of a few ways to go about it
 
damn them for locking it down to rtx. Would love to play some quake 2 with this kind of graphics.
 
damn them for locking it down to rtx. Would love to play some quake 2 with this kind of graphics.

The game is uses pure RT for all lighting, reflections, and shadows. The load would crush a card without dedicated HW.

You can always download Q2VKPT for cards without RT HW. This was the basis for the RTX version.

Edit. My mistake. Q2VKPT is also RTX based, but it is open source and only ~12K LOCs, so if/when another option becomes available to handle the RT calls, it could be switched.
 
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damn them for locking it down to rtx. Would love to play some quake 2 with this kind of graphics.

It's not locked to RTX, but to DXR.
If you have a GeForce RTX graphics card, or other capable hardware, you can experience the first 3 levels of the game for free, fully remastered with path-traced graphics and a variety of other enhancements.

So if AMD releases drivers that support DXR, it will work on them. How well it will run remains to be seen. I was getting like 10 fps on a 1080Ti with Q2PKVT...

The upshot is that it's based on the Q2PKVT project, not simply an installer for it.. so maybe they are going thru and correcting the lighting levels so it will not be so bright.

Some of you RTX owners need to give us a review once you've tried Quake II RTX compared to the Q2PKVT.

Edit:
This list of improvements: From the news post https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-june-6-release-date/ this has much more info than the page I initially posted. Looks like its going to be sweet!
The June 6th release will also look even better thanks to numerous improvements to image quality, and new additions that add even more path-traced enhancements. Highlights include:

  • Improved Global Illumination rendering, with three selectable quality presets, including two-bounce GI
  • Multiplayer support
  • Time of day options that radically change the appearance of some levels
  • New weapon models & textures
  • New dynamic environments (Stroggos surface, and space)
  • Better physically based atmospheric scattering, including settings for Stroggos sky
  • Real-time reflectivity of the player and weapon model on water and glass surfaces, and player model shadows, for owners of the complete game (the original Shareware release does not include player models)
  • Improved ray tracing denoising technology
  • All 3,000+ original game textures have been updated with a mix of Q2XP mod-pack textures and our own enhancements
  • Updated effects with new sprites and particle animations
  • Dynamic lighting for items such as blinking lights, signs, switches, elevators and moving objects
  • Caustics approximation to improve water lighting effects
  • High-quality screenshot mode that makes your screenshots look even better
  • Support for the old OpenGL renderer, enabling you to switch between RTX ON and RTX OFF
  • Cylindrical projection mode for wide-angle field of view on widescreen displays
 
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It's not locked to RTX, but to DXR.


So if AMD releases drivers that support DXR, it will work on them. How well it will run remains to be seen. I was getting like 10 fps on a 1080Ti with Q2PKVT...

It's not DXR. That's a Microsoft DX API.

This uses Vulcan, and an RTX extension (Runs on Linux and Windows).
 
Oh, I bet the linux drivers need that. So using Vulkan makes it work in multiple places. Specifically VKRay, vs DXR.

It's still an API though. So if AMD writes a driver that enables and uses VKRay, then the AMD cards can run it.

NVIDIA’s new Turing GPU unleashed real-time ray-tracing in a consumer GPU for the first time. Since then, much virtual ink has been spilled discussing ray tracing in DirectX 12. However, many developers want to embrace a more open approach using Vulkan, the low-level API supported by the Khronos Group. Vulkan enables developers to target many different platforms, including Windows and Linux, allowing for broader distribution of 3D-accelerated applications.

Vulkan is a hardware-agnostic API, and we’ve made sure VKRay is hardware agnostic as well. The entire API can be implemented on top of existing Vulkan compute functionality. We’ve also gone to great lengths to make sure that the extension fits well with existing Vulkan API concepts. Memory allocation, resource handling, and shader language/bytecode are handled in the same way that the core Vulkan API prescribes.

Source: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/vulkan-raytracing/
 
Oh, I bet the linux drivers need that. So using Vulkan makes it work in multiple places. Specifically VKRay, vs DXR.

It's still an API though. So if AMD writes a driver that enables and uses VKRay, then the AMD cards can run it.

Source: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/vulkan-raytracing/

Sure, but considering that it's a NVidia created extension and API, I would expect it would probably be more NVidia biased than DXR.

There is an advantage to being the company that defines the API, it's call structure and setup and order of calling functions will most likely resemble the low level operations of your specfic HW.

AMD hasn't provided DXR drivers and I would expect those before a VKray implementation.
 
Well I downloaded it and tried it. It functions without an RTX card but nothing special. I did find the standard issue pistol to be extra crappy tho, forgot all about that. I wish you could start with an axe or something, anything else
 
They've made things way too bright throughout that demo video, wiping out the atmosphere and mood, along with the colour. I would have expected them to exercise better discretion than what that video shows. But, it looks like they were so eager to show lighting that they forgot that tasteful lighting makes a better impression than lighting that just washes the colour out of everything.

I was doing that with gl_modulate 20 years ago. pfft.gl
 
Just a FYI but the lighting in game changes from day to night if you want to, you can set it to match your day.

Or play in nite mode, evening, day or dawn.
 
tried it on a 1080ti but got no ray tracing at all. looked normal q2. assume you have to have RTX?
 
So I tried this last night and I am utterly confused what I am supposed to be impressed about. I uninstalled it after a minute of running around and shooting. Oh and Metro Exodus completely maxed-out at 1440p ran with better frame-rates than this. :p

Also I never was into Quake growing up so I could care less about the game itself so I didn't bother playing more than a few minutes.
 
tried it on a 1080ti but got no ray tracing at all. looked normal q2. assume you have to have RTX?

You have all your windows and driver updates? From what I have read it will run on Pascal cards with ray tracing. Though you may need to lower resolution for playable frame rates.
 
will try again, there are yt videos showing it. i installed the 1080ti yesterday and updated laterst drivers over itself. came from an msi 970. all other win10pro updates installed to build 1809.
 
Tried it out for a bit last night on my 1080Ti and as expected it ran very poorly at max settings. I was eventually able to get it running decently though. Global illumination is what tanks the performance the most. At 1080p with this set to high the game ran like a slideshow. Turning it completely off more than doubled the frame rate bringing my average to around 30fps. Still not great but enough to let me explore the game. After playing around with more resolutions I decided to leave it at 1080p with the resolution scale at 80 (global illumination still off). This provided the best balance between image quality and performance. I would get around 60fps in small areas and mid 40s or so in larger areas.

As for the ray tracing effects I think they are really impressive. The way the pistol has a reflective surface that reflects everything in the environment was really neat and the other objects in the game with reflective surfaces were cool to look at. Lighting and shadows looked good as well and being able to adjust the time of day and other lighting settings is a nice touch that I plan to play around with more. The big downside to it all is obviously having to dial back the image quality to get a playable level of performance and turn off global illumination completely which seems to have a big impact on the look of the game. One day, though we'll have GPUs that can handle RT much better than the GPUs we have today. One day......
 
Tried it out for a bit last night on my 1080Ti and as expected it ran very poorly at max settings. I was eventually able to get it running decently though. Global illumination is what tanks the performance the most. At 1080p with this set to high the game ran like a slideshow. Turning it completely off more than doubled the frame rate bringing my average to around 30fps. Still not great but enough to let me explore the game. After playing around with more resolutions I decided to leave it at 1080p with the resolution scale at 80 (global illumination still off). This provided the best balance between image quality and performance. I would get around 60fps in small areas and mid 40s or so in larger areas.

As for the ray tracing effects I think they are really impressive. The way the pistol has a reflective surface that reflects everything in the environment was really neat and the other objects in the game with reflective surfaces were cool to look at. Lighting and shadows looked good as well and being able to adjust the time of day and other lighting settings is a nice touch that I plan to play around with more. The big downside to it all is obviously having to dial back the image quality to get a playable level of performance and turn off global illumination completely which seems to have a big impact on the look of the game. One day, though we'll have GPUs that can handle RT much better than the GPUs we have today. One day......

Great, so it can run, will try again. not concerned about game play, more to get in and just look around. Looking into this on google also led me to Minecraft with Ray Tracing. May have to try that and confuse the heck out of the 6 year old when he plays next.
 
So how many years until we can run this at 4K/120Hz with all settings maxxed? Lol. THAT will be the way to play this!

I wish they'd do the original Quake, too.
 
I get 15fps on my GTX 1060 6gb at 720p with Global Illumination on low.

It's unplayable, will try again next time I upgrade my video card.

And I thought they would at least redo the textures. Nope, you're stuck with the same old textures and geometry from 1998.

This game really feels unoptimized to me (it's slower than any of the demos I played at 1080p on my 1060), so hopefully they will fix things between the time I upgrade to RTX.
 
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