Quake II RTX
- Thread starter The Old School Gamer
- Start date
I did like the update to Quake 3 - which originally came from modders - which allowed a live miniature 3D scene to be used as the skybox by rendering it first behind the world - think it was first seen in an official game in FAKK2.
I'm surprised the amount of effort going into Quake 2 RTX though - FSR, HDR, masked texture support amongst other things have been added to the source, possibly even going to get parallax occlusion maps or tessellation along with extended BSP feature support for larger maps, etc. might actually end up with an engine with feature parity to latest and greatest while still idtech2 at its roots.
Official new release coming "soon" meanwhile you can grab in-development binaries from: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/actions click on the latest one and then under "Artifacts" download either the Windows or Linux package as appropriate and extract to your Quake 2 RTX installation folder. (Probably want to make sure it doesn't overwrite your config file as it includes a default one).
New features include HDR support, AMD FSR and a bunch of other fixes/behind the scenes features most people won't notice.
New features include HDR support, AMD FSR and a bunch of other fixes/behind the scenes features most people won't notice.
I'm a bit late on the news but new update has gone live which includes support for HDR, FSR and some other misc AMD optimisations as well as a load of other changes - mostly to support modding or background fixes rather than changes you'll immediately notice.
Associate
The FSR implementation works great, can get a solid 60 FPS at 1440p with 80% resolution scale. Plenty enough for Quake II considering I first played it at 24fps in software mode at 640x480!
I first played the test or demo at like 18 FPS 512x384 software renderer :s then I got a new machine which was a bit faster but tried to play it on my ATI Rage II+ 3D or whatever it was using a DX wrapper and it was like 9 FPS with hardware 3D LOL - which prompted me to get a Voodoo 1.
Associate
Those were the days! I had an integrated ATi Rage Pro and wasn't aware of the DX wrapper so had to wait for the beta OpenGL driver that was released towards the end of it's support life to experience hardware acceleration in Q2. Needless to say it wasn't great but anything was better than software mode. I would have killed for a Voodoo card at the time!
It also managed Quake 3 somehow, I had to use vertex lighting and low settings but to play it at all was a relief. I had to wait for a few years to get a Kyro II card before I could experience both in their full glory.
512x384 on software rendering would have been a luxury for me!
1996 I had my first PC - Pentium 133Mhz, 2MB on board graphics, 16MB RAM, Soundblaster 16. Games at that time ran perfectly fine - Duke Nukem 3d, Doom, Quake, C&C, Redalert etc. But it was the dawn of 3d accelerators...
The Quake II demo released mid 1997 I think on a magazine. I remember looking in the magazine how brilliant it looked... Queue me firing it up and being able to play in software rendering at 400 x 300 at about 15fps. 320 x 240 it was, like all other games!
I saved my hard earned 13 year old cash from car washing, chores, pocket money and birthday and spend what seemed like a fortune (£150) on a Matrox Mystique 220. What a huge pile of dog excrament that was!
Games that did run in Matrox mode looked not much better than software rendering and often ran worse! Quake II ran slightly better in 400 x 300 but fps was still terrible.
I was devistated but it tought me to research what I buy instead of buying based on advertising on the box and being '64 bit' At least Motoracer ran nice!
It wasnt until 1999 I purchased a Voodoo II card and ran Quake 2 and Unreal in glorious 640 x 480 running at way over 30fps. Unreal ran even worse than Quake II on the Matrox card.
The Voodoo II lasted many years before getting my first Nvidia card. All hail 3dfx. Matrox, you suck balls
I did similar in 1998 to get a 3dfx Voodoo 2 12 MB and what a transformational experience that was, particularly in Quake 2 (my main reason for getting it). Thankfully I didn't make the same mistake you did, but I'm glad you corrected it eventually
.I got my first 3d card - a 6 MB Pure 3D - when they first appeared. The earliest article I can find online is from 97 but I think I bought mine in 96. I chose it over the stock 3dfx card because of the extra 2 MB texture memory. I think I paired it with a Trident or Cirrus Logic VGA card. I ditched both for the 3dfx Voodoo 2 12 MB. Looking back, I've always been one for apparently excessive VRAM.
I think it was about a week or 2 later one of my friends bought a Voodoo rush. It was then I realised I made a mistake as he fired up POD racer and it ran buttery smooth, probably 40-60 fps. I really should have thrown that Matrox card in the bin back then or boxed it up and left it in the attic to resell 20 years later for a good amount as 'retro'.I did similar in 1998 to get a 3dfx Voodoo 2 12 MB and what a transformational experience that was, particularly in Quake 2 (my main reason for getting it). Thankfully I didn't make the same mistake you did, but I'm glad you corrected it eventually
Associate
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- 6 Jan 2013
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BTW Quake 2 is currently £1.50 on Kinguin
Man of Honour
Cheers, thought I had this already but clearly not!
Man of Honour
Uninstalled, it's impressive as tech, but it's also ancient and a bit meh 
Uninstalled, it's impressive as tech, but it's also ancient and a bit meh
I wish nVidia had taken the time to create some custom maps and/or remaster some of the existing maps to show off the tech better. Only the first base levels really are much fun for playing.