Quake II RTX

[The Old School Gamer]

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-june-6-release-date/

LOL awesome, at least it's something positive for ray tracing.

[EDIT] Released.

https://international.download.nvidia.com/downloads/quake-2-rtx/q2rtx-1.0.0.exe

The above download contains the first 3 levels for a demo.
Or if you have the original installed it will patch the entire game.

 

[The Old School Gamer]

Mah it does not look that bad lol.

 

[The Old School Gamer]

It must be 15+ years since I lasted played Quake II, hence I have totally forgotten the levels etc.
This PC is rocking a RTX 2070 so I figured I'll give it a try (nothing to lose).

Also have a HD version of QII kicking around here downloaded from moddb.com, just never made the time to install and play it.

 

[The Old School Gamer]

Will this work at all on Pascal hardware or is it exclusively Turing?

Nvidia has enabled ray tracing on pascal.
How well it will run on pascal is a different matter though.

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-to-enable-directx-raytracing-dxr-for-pascal-and-volta

[EDIT]

Hmmm dunno exactly... tends to indicate you need RT cores.

Quake II RTX Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows 7 64-bit or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i3-3220, or AMD equivalent
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, or higher
Storage: 2GB available space

 

[The Old School Gamer]

Pretty picture time.

Intel 5820k @stock
MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z @stock
16Gb DDR4 @2133
Medium setting

Spoiler: 3440p / 28fps

Spoiler: 1440p / 38fps

Spoiler: 1080p / 65fps

Spoiler: Quake II XP Mod / 3440p / 108fps

It's a good technical demonstration of ray tracing in action on a older lower polygon count game.
But it really only confirms that the GPU horse power is somewhat lacking for it to go main stream anytime soon.

The real question is does realistic lighting sources and shading add to the enjoyment factor of playing this game.
I would have to say no, I much prefer the higher textures quality of the XP mod over what ray tracing brings to the table.

Where and when ray tracing will come into it's own is when game graphics transition to more life like rendering models.
Old flat plain surface games like this don't do ray tracing any justice imho.