
Q2VKPT: Fully path traced Quake 2 - Impossible
http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt
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donatj
That's super interesting, like the detail is low, obviously but the realness
of the lighting almost feels better than a lot of triple A games I've played
lately in a way that makes _this_ almost feel _more_ real.

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billconan
recently saw someone used deep learning to create higher resolution textures
for old games. might be something to add on top of this to get more details:

[https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/classic_doom_has_r...](https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/classic_doom_has_received_an_amazing_graphical_overhaul_through_the_power_of_ai/1)

[https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-being-
us...](https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-being-used-to-
generate-hq-textures-for-older-games-you-can-do-it-yourself.88272/)

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1_player
What about.. AI-powered texture compression.

Train the game upscaling AI with high resolution textures, then ship the game
with lower res textures. High quality rendering with smaller file sizes,
though won't be as good as the original pictures.

Not very useful in reality, but would be a pretty neat proof of concept.

The question is: would the AI data be smaller than shipping the high quality
textures in the first place?

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rasz
Shipping size is usually not the limiting factor for texture size, GPU memory
is. Texture compression must work on small blocks for random pixel addressing.

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0-_-0
Which doesn't entirely rule out a deep learning based compressor, just makes
it much harder :)

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Lerc
A couple of things that would be interesting to try with this. Artificially
increasing the geometry with simple subdivision to give a measure of the
impact of geometry on the scene.

Do a bloom post-processing filter to give the impression of brighter than
maximum. I can see how this might not be considered the point because it's not
a ray-tracing solution, but it is a simple screen-space operation that's
independent of the technique used to generate the base image. Including such a
filter can add a lot of visual appeal, particularly enhancing the lighting
benefits of path tracing.

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floatboth
Huh, I wonder if applying that denoising filter to the OpenGL compute version
[https://raytracey.blogspot.com/2016/06/real-time-path-
traced...](https://raytracey.blogspot.com/2016/06/real-time-path-traced-
quake-2.html) is going to be as good

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jl6
A very cool project, kudos to the developers. I don’t want to take anything
away from it, but I did stop noticing the graphics pretty quickly and just
started watching the gameplay. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of remembering the
original overriding the cool-factor of ray tracing.

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TeMPOraL
Same here. Maybe it's partially because I remember the game, and partially
because graphics here are good enough to not to distract. In a similar vein, I
recently played the remastered version of Modern Warfare 1, and it felt just
like I remember playing the original - i.e. a good contemporary game. Were I
to play original now, it would feel _dated_.

Except full scene water reflection. This is pure awesomeness, and completely
distracted me from watching gameplay.

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viraptor
That reminds me of the [http://www.q3rt.de/](http://www.q3rt.de/) project. I
wish someone tried to port that one to rtx.

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BadassFractal
Seeing Q2 bring back all sorts of memories. That was right about the time for
me when I started seeing the benefits of dedicated graphics cards, and Q2 felt
magical with one.

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cellularmitosis
TRESPASSAH!!!

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cellularmitosis
Here’s the reference for those unfamiliar with quake 2.
[https://youtu.be/-rWifmDuJEA](https://youtu.be/-rWifmDuJEA)

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xaduha
I guess if there's ever a reason to replay Q2 single-player, that would be it.

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heipei
That and the soundtrack ;)

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xaduha
You need a disk for that as in CD-DA, unless that was patched to use files.

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m_mueller
I'd love a version of Half-Life (using the original engine) with this, that's
for sure.

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remlov
You're in luck: [https://www.dsogaming.com/news/classic-half-life-gets-
esrgan...](https://www.dsogaming.com/news/classic-half-life-gets-esrgan-ai-
enhanced-hd-textures-available-for-download/)

~~~
lkj
Raytracing, not textures.

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ris
It should probably be noted also that this doesn't even seem to be using
textures updated with normal & specular maps. This is probably why all the
surfaces appear a bit plasticky.

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ezekg
Those water reflections were oddly satisfying to see.

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yason
They might have wanted to build the demo on some game that has more realistic
geometry and textures to showcase the benefits of raytracing. Quake 2 still
looks 90's mostly. I can spot the "hard" features in the demo myself to some
extent but given well-known shading techniques you could get a close enough
similar emulation of the effects that would fool most people.

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runeks
> Fully dynamic global illumination using path tracing, with raytraced
> shadows, glossy reflections and one bounce of indirect lighting.

I wonder how different two, three and four bounces of indirect lighting would
make it look.

Would be super interesting to see a side-by-side comparison.

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marvin
How hard would it be to implement varying resolution across the monitor with
this approach, e.g. to combine with an eye-tracker to ensure that only the
parts that the user looks at, are rendered in full resolution?

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legwork
Varying resolution is trivial with raytracing, however a big part of the work
here is not tied to screen resolution. Lighting is sampled far below screen
resolution and needs to be reconstructed over multiple frames. Eye position
adds no useful information here. Doing full-resolution "cinematic quality"
path-tracing would require hardware that is magnitudes faster.

Having said that, variable shading rate is a feature of the newest NVIDIA GPUs
(and supported by Wolfenstein: New Order) and it could be used with a
sufficiently low-latency eye tracker rather trivially as well.

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pavlov
It feels like the effect could be improved by disabling most of the texture
maps. The low resolution and baked-in lighting distracts from the physically
correct surface shading.

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jadbox
To be honest, I'd really rather see this for Quake 1, which imho had better
overall gameplay.

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terramex
Quake 2 introduced (and overused) coloured lights, which are great showcase of
path-tracing's capabilities.

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jesuslop
woa, the water reflects

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lstodd
Why, oh why not the first Quake?

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LoSboccacc
core i9 x are coming awfully close to larrabee performance as demonstrated in
2008, we should be close to be doing this on the cpu unassisted

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cmrdporcupine
Very strange, I'm on a JetBlue flight and the website appears to be
blacklisted on their in-flight WiFi ("Fly-Fi")?

