Quake II RTX

Soldato
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Yeah so i ran this on my 5ghz 9700k and 2080 at 1440p 144fps...@ 35 fps and instantly turned off the rtx and switched to open GL for about 3 mins of nostalgia then uninstalled thinking what the actual **** was that waste of my life.

great advertising Nvidia... make me feel like more of a chump spending 600 quid on this card.
This will now be the benchmark game for all future rtx cards for the next few years. You were there at the beginning.
 
Man of Honour
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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.

Definitely the lack of geometry that well support physically based rendering of surfaces doesn't help but also the light sources in the Quake 2 maps un-tweaked doesn't really show ray tracing off at its best - XP mod I dislike the harder lighting and loss and/or static indirect lighting, etc. that loses some of the spirit of the original while ray tracing could, with remade maps recreate the atmosphere of the original.
 
Man of Honour
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Started doing a bit of a remake (complete build from scratch not a reverse compile) of base1 though without seeing the lighting in motion it doesn't really do it justice and I'm having problems capturing video from the game at the moment:

UsRApEO.png
 
Man of Honour
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^^ Very moody, dark and mercurial. Just how I like my graphics.

Looks like you've got a Radeon running that. ;) :p :D

I have to run it looking like this to get playable framerates at high quality :(

t9NjV8z.png

Full resolution:

fnOyeBZ.png

It is actually quite hard to get a nice gritty dark look with reasonable light balance in Quake 2 as they've limited/removed point lights or any light values and just use materials as light sources with a fixed emission level so it is a lot of tricking things up to light the map at all and hard to get that shiny realistic ray traced look while keeping it dark and moody with the limitations of the current implementation.
 
Man of Honour
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I was quite surprised it mostly runs at 60 FPS at 640x480 on a 1070 with high settings - which might sound quite meh but gives me hope that we aren't too far off being able to do this proper at good resolutions.
 
Man of Honour
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They added an auto-tone mapper in the latest update to balance out dark bits (not really a bad thing overall) but means my rework map went from looking like:

y8AhfNl.png

to

Qw9zahJ.jpg

And a bit Unreal looking heh:

h4FUUnK.png

IPV1qgW.jpg

Overall I'm not against it though as it makes it easier, with a bit of adjustment, to get more balanced lighting.
 
Man of Honour
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Quake 2 might just be the game that makes me buy a Turing GPU :( though not really good use of money versus holding out for what comes after Turing.

Having a lot of fun anyhow (still work in progress)

vAZLBe4.png
 
Man of Honour
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Quake 2 might just be the game that makes me buy a Turing GPU :( though not really good use of money versus holding out for what comes after Turing.

Having a lot of fun anyhow (still work in progress)

vAZLBe4.png
Same here. Completely unrelated to RTX I've just been playing Q2 and have a broad smile across my face. If there was an active multiplayer scene with RTX I'd get a card.
 
Caporegime
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I can see where you're coming from. The more this gains traction (especially with older gems like this), then the more likely I am to pick up a raytracing capable GPU - though ideally, I would like to see what AMD can deliver on that front as well.
 
Man of Honour
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Same here. Completely unrelated to RTX I've just been playing Q2 and have a broad smile across my face. If there was an active multiplayer scene with RTX I'd get a card.

One of the things that has impressed me is the water rendering with caustics albeit it doesn't seem to do a proper simulation of scattered light bouncing off the water surface itself and caustics are approximated though convincingly enough for video game use. Even in Quake 2 let alone a game with higher resolution geometry and support for more advanced shaders, etc. water is very impressive - unfortunately a screenshot doesn't really do it justice without seeing it in realtime and unfortunately I'm having problems capturing video from the game:

xYcxR1n.jpg

With the inclusion of physics based water volumes it would be very very impressive.
 
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