Quake 2 With Realtime GPU Pathtracing

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rgMekanic

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Edd Biddulph, computer graphics programmer has released a video showing his from-scratch GPU-based pathtracer created specifically for Quake 2. Despite running on a Titan Xp there is some noise, which is inevitable on today's hardware. By Biddulph's estimates, it will be another 15-20 years before GPU hardware is powerful enough to do real time path or ray tracing.

I'll be honest, before seeing this and doing a little digging, I didn't know much about raytracing and pathtracing. Having learned a bit more this is quite incredible, and despite the YouTube compression, you can really see the impressive lighting effects coming from this 20 year old game. You can find the source code for this GPU pathtracer on GitHub

This is a from-scratch GPU-based pathtracer created specifically for Quake 2. It has several optimisations which are only viable due to the typical characteristics of Quake 2 such as support for parallogram-shaped lightsources, BSP ray traversal, and special handling of sky 'surfaces' (portals). It doesn't officially have a name, but you can call it Raylgun.
 
This looks really good; I still play Q2 on LAN.

It's not fucked over on player progression, bought upgrades, or blatant cheating.

It's hard to cheat with our crew; we play with cheats enabled. :)

We do Q2 Ground Zero; a give all when you enter, and a give all for every kill.

You have lots of toys to play with, and no delays in action at all.

It's a mf Fragfest.

I will figure out how to compile this; I don't think our Q2 directory has changed in years.

Love to see girls wearing the CrakHor skins, lol. Or wannabe girls, whatever.
 
You know, games don't have to look good to be successful. In point of fact, Minecraft and more recently Friday the 13th (not personally interested) have made people a ton of money. Diablo II and WoW are still wildly played! Feels to me like the same pollsters who said Trump would lose are running the video game business, they ain't gettin' it. Shadows and lighting are it guys, that's why Thief was so successful. This was an awesome video, brought me back to action half life days.
 
This is a really cool demo. but it also shows just how much work is put into modern game engines to 'good enough' these effects at a much faster render speed.
 
Mugato said:
You know, games don't have to look good to be successful. In point of fact, Minecraft and more recently Friday the 13th (not personally interested) have made people a ton of money. Diablo II and WoW are still wildly played! Feels to me like the same pollsters who said Trump would lose are running the video game business, they ain't gettin' it. Shadows and lighting are it guys, that's why Thief was so successful. This was an awesome video, brought me back to action half life days.
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Yeah, it's the game (also concept and story to a degree), not the graphics that make it.
 
DrBorg said:
This looks really good; I still play Q2 on LAN.

It's not fucked over on player progression, bought upgrades, or blatant cheating.

It's hard to cheat with our crew; we play with cheats enabled. :)

We do Q2 Ground Zero; a give all when you enter, and a give all for every kill.

You have lots of toys to play with, and no delays in action at all.

It's a mf Fragfest.

I will figure out how to compile this; I don't think our Q2 directory has changed in years.

Love to see girls wearing the CrakHor skins, lol. Or wannabe girls, whatever.
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Q2 is still one of my favorites. Glad to hear some are still kickin it oldschool :)

Ground zero was lots of fun. Used to love getting the nuke and dropping it in the middle of the map with quad damage. Just about clears the entire map :)
 
While I understand, well enough, what ray tracing is I can't help but seem a bit "why?" on this video.

I guess proof and concept...still have a hard time imagining a Titan Xp can't do Quake 2 without artifacts. I seem to recall playing some ray tracing games with better graphics and less noise years ago on much older hardware? Maybe his version just needs more work?
 
Intel did a lot of work on raytracing id games back when the Xeon Phi was supposed to be a graphics card. The results were beautiful but the performance was very poor.
 
RogueTadhg said:
I'm not sure of the importance to the video. Can someone enlighten me?
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Raytracing done properly can provide a much better and realistic lighting to the environment and effects, a holy grail of sorts for graphics, but its incredibly resource intensive to do so its really cool seeing even a old game like this kinda pull it off.
 
If this is what those unbaised 3d renderers do than it's more closely replicating how light actually behaves which, given realistic models and textures, produce realistic renders with much less artistic assistance than other biased renderers. In other words, less development time. Sure, it takes longer to render to get rid of all that noise, but this is a likely future for real-time rendering engines as it is all much more dynamic (no light maps, baking, shadow map artifacts, etc...)

Here is a popular unbiased rendering engine (GPU, realtime even) that is popular nowadays:
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/
 
This along with vector based objects (100% destructible/physics based) is where I see the future going. I've been imagining it basically all my life (this is not new tech), so it's always cool seeing some folks take a stab at it. Even if our hardware is not quite up to the task, there are still lots to learn about how to best optimize this and how the developer's tools might change and be of benefit to artists and game designers.
 
For me, after watching the full video (and downloading it too), I would have to say that there is a natural feel to this work that I miss every time I step into the gaming worlds. It's funny seeing it applied rather successfully to an older video game since even though it looks like an old 90s game, which it is, there is more "life" in it than the most cutting edge projects - in a way. Best example of how our human physiology trumps game physics in a long time!
 
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I've seen a few other games ray traced. The first one I recall seeing was Quake 3. It was able to be done in real time but needed a cluster of servers to get it done.
 
Plenty of people would gladly spend $20k+ on a system to have this in modern games... So much demand, so many barriers to be able to supply...
 
Man I used to love the days when I would come home from work after buying such a game at lunchtime in the big cardboard box with the manual and CD in it. Probably also stopped off at the newsagents to pick up the latest copy of PC Format to get the cover CD that had all the latest patches, drivers, DirectX/OpenGL/Glide updates etc. in order to run it. Back then trying to get some updates over dial up was a real pain.

Good times.
 
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