NVIDIA re-imagines Quake II with RTX

Over at the GPU Technology Conference in San Francisco, NVIDIA showed off a demonstration of Quake II with real-time ray tracing effects. The work is based on Q2VKPT, which was released in January 2019, a ray-traced version of Quake II developed by former NVIDIA intern Christoph Schied, a Ph.D. student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

NVIDIA developed some additions for Q2VKPT, resulting in more eye candy:

“But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. A lot. We’ve introduced real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight and indirect illumination; refraction on water and glass; emissive, reflective and transparent surfaces; normal and roughness maps for added surface detail; particle and laser effects for weapons; procedural environment maps featuring mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed; a flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk; an improved denoiser; SLI support (hands-up if you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI back in the day); Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more!

More screenshots at the NVIDIA blog.