Q2VKPT Brings Ray Tracing to Quake 2

AlphaAtlas

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Graphics developers just released an ray traced version of Quake 2, which they claim to be "the first playable game that is entirely raytraced and efficiently simulates fully dynamic lighting in real-time." Calling it a Quake 2 mod is a bit of an understatement, as the project represents a Vulkan rewrite of most of Q2PRO's rendering code, which is itself a massive modification of Quake 2. The researchers say the project "is meant to serve as a proof-of-concept for computer graphics research and the game industry alike," and that it serves as a glimpse into a future where ray tracing has replaced rasterization. If you want to try it out, the initial release can be downloaded on the project's Github page. Thanks to RPS for spotting the release.

Check out the ray traced Quake 2 footage here.

VKPT and Q2VKPT were created by Christoph Schied as a spare-time project to validate the results of computer graphics research in an actual game. The project currently encompasses 12K lines of code and completely replaces the original Quake II graphics code. Initially, it was prototyped in OpenGL with contributions by Johannes Hanika (Experimental Ray Tracing, Shaders, GL/Vulkan Fixes), Addis Dittebrandt (Light Hierarchy, Debug Visualisation), Tobias Zirr (Light Sampling, Hack Supervision and Instigation, Website, Info Texts), and Florian Reibold (Initial Light Hierarchy). Additional help was provided by Stephan Bergmann, Emanuel Schrade, Alisa Jung, and Christoph Peters (made some noise).
 
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".
 
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:
 
This actually sounds really cool. It's like the mods with HD textures for Doom, Quake, etc. Sounds like we can look forward to raytraced vintage goodness..

(wish I had an RTX card now...)
 
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:

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.)
 
Im not savy on the Ray tracing but my understanding was it being some physx-esque fancy improvement to games was just a sales pitch, a way of getting users hyped for it. It's more that it's an improvement to the way graphics are generated right? It has the "potential" to make things look fancier, but thats not the primary intent right?
 
Im not savy on the Ray tracing but my understanding was it being some physx-esque fancy improvement to games was just a sales pitch, a way of getting users hyped for it. It's more that it's an improvement to the way graphics are generated right? It has the "potential" to make things look fancier, but thats not the primary intent right?

This really isn't a ray tracing vs rasterization what is thread. Suffice to say TRUE ray tracing is superior to rasterization. The Nv implementation is a small sample of rays and not a true full on ray tracing implementation. A true 100% ray tracing image will give you photo-realistic images. That's just not possible real time on today's PC hardware.

EDIT: From the webpage - "Q2VKPT will cast at least 4 rays for each pixel"

Photorealistic ray tracing has >1000 rays per pixel - just to let you know where we are at.
 
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THIS is a much better example of how ray tracing can change and make a game better looking. The illumination in the dark by the weapons and explosions are much better than on look shiny reflections EVERYWHERE.

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...
 
So I need a 1200 dollar RTX GPU to play Quake2 ???

No thanks. Shiny reflections on 20 year old 640 x 400 resolution.....yahoo.
 
i've skimmed through the original document, and while it mentions "hardware-accelerated raytracing", i didn't see any statement about a geforce RTX being needed ? (i might have missed it) ... will it run on other graphics cards ?
in other words, will any form of "hardware-accelerated raytracing" be exclusive to RTX, or just slower on other cards ?
 
i've skimmed through the original document, and while it mentions "hardware-accelerated raytracing", i didn't see any statement about a geforce RTX being needed ? (i might have missed it) ... will it run on other graphics cards ?
in other words, will any form of "hardware-accelerated raytracing" be exclusive to RTX, or just slower on other cards ?

This is compiled for RTX, it wont work without a card that supports that.
 
This is cool.

Also they switched in a skeletal based animation system from the looks of it because the weapon model doesn't look like it's made of Jell-O.
 
Can’t wait to play Quake 2 at 15fps!

I guess you didn't watch the video...it runs just fine.

Admittedly, we didn't see any sections with a huge amount of action going on, so who knows later in the game.
 
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...
 
Sooo to recap the currently available RTX games: Battlefield V, Quake 2

Final Fantasy too. Whoa boy. It’s only been months and months and we have three games.

Quake 2 actually looks pretty good with RT.
 
For whatever reason... the older one (from almost a year ago?) that looked super grainy looked.... better? but maybe that's just me lol..
 
that is actually quite good looking when you go back and compare it to the original experience...
 
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.
 
This is the sort of thing that could actually get me to pick up an RTX card. (though I prefer to wait for the next iteration) If a bunch of my old favorites started supporting some decent RT implementations, I'd have no choice but to jump.

Say if, Borderlands, Doom 3, RAGE, Quake 3, Quake 4, one of the mid-range to late UTs, Riddick (fat chance on this one but...) were updated, I'd be foaming for a card. More-so than many new games. (though I am looking forward to Atomic Heart)

I don't think it really needs it based on what I've seen, but I wonder if Witchfire might get some RT features.
 
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.)
I know, I was referring to the fact that the game was actually playable at fluid frame rates (without a ton of work from an AAA dev and Nvidia) and not the technical applications of how The RTX just works. I own one and don't really give a damn about the Ray tracing features. I use the hell out of the 30+% boost over a 1080Ti tho.
 
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.

the call that fails specifically mentions NV and ray tracing functionality. That would be RTX.


EDIT - add'l info

"VK_NV_ray_tracing"

VK - vulkan
NV - Nvidia
Ray_tracing - pretty self explanatory, RTX hook.

Feel free to try it yourself.
 
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the call that fails specifically mentions NV and ray tracing functionality. That would be RTX.


EDIT - add'l info

"VK_NV_ray_tracing"

VK - vulkan
NV - Nvidia
Ray_tracing - pretty self explanatory, RTX hook.

Feel free to try it yourself.


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.
 
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.
I was talking about the project under the article referenced specifically relating to NV and Raytracing.
 
the call that fails specifically mentions NV and ray tracing functionality. That would be RTX.


EDIT - add'l info

"VK_NV_ray_tracing"

VK - vulkan
NV - Nvidia
Ray_tracing - pretty self explanatory, RTX hook.

Feel free to try it yourself.
Where are you seeing that? I was looking at the source files, and saw a lot of references to VKPT, but didn't find VK_MV_ray_tracing. Admitted, I wasn't looking too hard, but where that is specifically listed could give us further clues on the implementation.

As far as trying it myself - I don't think my R9 285 would do too well.

Now, I'd really love if someone could try a conversion like this to Descent!
 
Where are you seeing that? I was looking at the source files, and saw a lot of references to VKPT, but didn't find VK_MV_ray_tracing. Admitted, I wasn't looking too hard, but where that is specifically listed could give us further clues on the implementation.

As far as trying it myself - I don't think my R9 285 would do too well.

Now, I'd really love if someone could try a conversion like this to Descent!


Here's the Vulkan comments.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/master/appendices/VK_NV_ray_tracing.txt
 
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
 
Ok, that's the actual Vulkan spec, but just because it has NV in the name, does that mean it is Nvidia RTX exclusive? One of the contributors is from AMD, and another is from Intel. I'd have a hard time believing that those companies would allow their employees to work on their behalf for a feature that they couldn't use. It may be kind of like the AMD_64 builds of *nix software, which all work on Intel chips. Anyone have full knowledge of this particular extension?
 
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