
Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan - nullifidian
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-tracing-vulkan-vkray-geforce-rtx/
======
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
The new lighting makes such a dramatic difference. Despite the same low
polygon count, the levels seem much more lifelike. If all the game classics
are re-released with raytracing engines, I will be all over it. The next years
are going to be good.

~~~
pizza234
I'm very skeptical.

This is not just RTT; there's a big amount of rework. Likely, any old game
would look significantly better with such development effort (in other words,
with any good remastering).

This could be considered a great market stunt - the graphical improvement is
touted to be due to RTX (ray tracing), while it's actually due to many
factors.

On top of that, it misleads people into thinking that this type of improvement
is typical of ray tracing, and that it comes at virtually no cost, while
currently, ray tracing takes a big performance hit, and it's generally hard to
notice.

Q2VKPT is close to the concept "improved with ray tracing", and while
certainly impressive, it doesn't yield the same "AMAZING!" effect.

~~~
lanevorockz
Not sure what can you be skeptical about. The difference from RT Quake to
Quake it’s only that the lights are not precompiled at the beginning of the
level. Any other game just need to rework the light baking step to use RTX and
job done.

The only downside that can be pointed out is that you are hardware dependent.
Would be amazing to see thing in a console, all games with dynamic lighting
would help developer and gamers.

~~~
mbel
> The difference from RT Quake to Quake it’s only that the lights are not
> precompiled

In the linked demo video they also use new high resolution textures. Which
include not only color data as in the original Quake, but also normal maps and
maps with PBR parameters (metalness, roughness).

------
quadcore
The original textures were done by Adrian Carmack. I think he's a genius as
much as John. He was capable of making a difficult theme really work: a mix
between dark future and fantasy. Specially fantasy with guns is terribly
difficult and I don't recall having seen a game that succeeded in making that
mix as well as the Quake series.

~~~
gagege
Maybe this isn't what you're talking about, but Bungie's game Destiny is a
pretty great example of medieval fantasy transposed several thousand years
into the future.

~~~
jsgo
Is it? I only played Destiny 2 and from the parts I really got into (pre-
expansions), I didn't get a very medieval fantasy vibe at any points. Most of
the architecture was fairly modern or alien. Was nice though.

Anthem has some buildings that have an older feel out in the freeplay areas,
but even that would be a stretch.

~~~
nessus42
It's much more apparent in Destiny 1, with the Hive architecture, which is
like something out of Mordor. And in the Forsaken expansion to Destiny 2,
where The Dreaming City seems like a high-fantasy kingdom, but under attack by
evil forces.

~~~
jsgo
ah, nice. Can't remember if it was Hive or a different faction, but while
playing the core game of D2, I thought it was nice because the environment you
dealt with them reminded me a lot of Alien (without the xenomorph, obviously).
I think that was one thing D2 did well: in the core game, there are multiple
factions that are pretty distinct so it almost feels like different games at
times.

~~~
nessus42
Yes, you are right: the Hive architecture is also rather _Alien_ -ish!

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pornel
I love RTX, but it's so hard to demonstrate it. It doesn't give _presence_ of
any "wow!" effect (apart from demos that overdo reflections), it only gives
_absence_ of incorrect shadows, and humans are bad at noticing absence of
things.

Instead of "wow" you get "well, duh, that's how things should look".

~~~
kuzehanka
Path tracing has huge wow factor. The problem with RTX is that on current gen
hardware it runs at laughably low sample rates and the result is very noisy
even after DLDN.

Games are handling this by dialling the amplitude of RTX effects way down and
having a smoothing pass. After all that is done, the wow effect is gone and
you're just left with a more dynamic version of the same or worse aesthetics
that we're already used to.

I expect it'll truly take off on next gen hardware, whenever that rolls out.

Here's what RTX+DLDN actually looks like if not dialled down and smoothed:
[https://youtu.be/CuoER1DwYLY?t=553](https://youtu.be/CuoER1DwYLY?t=553)

My takeaway is yes that quake 2 demo looks really cool, but you just know that
they used every black magic hack in the book to get there, and most of it
can't be replicated in a modern high fidelity game. It's definitely not a case
of flicking an 'RTX on' switch.

~~~
echeese
What's DLDN? I tried Googling it with some relevant keywords but it just
brings me back to this comment.

~~~
kuzehanka
Deep learning denoiser. I don't know if NVIDIA came up with some marketing
term for it. It's what allows RTX to produce meaningful images at all despite
the renderer running at 0.5-2 samples per pixel which looks little better than
random noise. I kind of assumed they'd call it DLDN because they called their
deep learning supersampling DLSS. I guess not, go figure.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjTPV2pXY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjTPV2pXY0)

------
apk-d
Rtx really shines when applied to a low-fidelity game like Q2. The difference
isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and
tricks approximates physical lighting closely, though.

I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption)
raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users,
as it has been with many other hardware advancements.

~~~
jplayer01
But... That's the biggest benefit of raytracing/path tracing. It's why the
movie industry is already all-in on it and has been for years. It's just in
games where for some reason gamers don't understand the benefits and are so
eager to dismiss it if they don't immediately see everything look 10x more
amazing or realistic, entirely missing the point.

~~~
billfruit
Perhaps many games do not require realistic light, rather some type of
simplistic model serves gameplay well enough, I do not know what kind of light
modeling was used in Sunset Overdrive, but that type of oversaturated lighting
works for some games.

------
nickjj
Wow that's a big difference.

It reminds me of what it was like to first see 3dfx OpenGL mode in Quake II
when I got a Voodoo graphics card.

~~~
jacobush
Not Glide mode? ;)

~~~
nickjj
Now that you mention it, I don't remember if it was opengl or glide, it was
over 20 years ago. Same effect tho.

I just remember seeing all of the ambient lights and glows and thinking how
amazing it looked. Specifically some early campaign map where you're going
through dark sewers that had a bunch of little lights that emit a glow.

But after the coolness factor wore off, it was back to using the most minimal
settings possible to maximize visibility and frame rates to play it online.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
If it was Voodoo you'd be using Glide. That was their proprietary API.

But yeah, the biggest improvement was putting it into Glide/OpenGL and
watching all the new lights appear.

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Roritharr
Digital Foundry has an amazing analysis video and have talked to the original
creator, highly enjoyable:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRCAfdBMe2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRCAfdBMe2Y)

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mstade
I hope raytracing will enable some remasters of amazing old games. No need for
new content, changing the stories or gameplay, just vastly improved graphics.
I always preferred the Quake series for multiplayer, but Half-Life was great
single player. Max Payne would be a great replay with better graphics. Some
old flight sims like Jane's WWII Fighters, X-Wing v Tie Fighter, Wing
Commander... I'd pay cash monies for this.

------
narrator
This is great to see. Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d and
elaborate fake raytracing to run fast and look amazing on slow hardware. As
technology improved, first we got a real 3d engine and now we finally have a
real raytracing engine.

~~~
mbel
What do you mean "fake 3d"? They are as 3D as any other computer generated
images with linear perspective. Quake is even using a rasterizer like nearly
all games today.

~~~
kkapelon
Doom used 2D sprites, so "fake 3d" if you ask me.

~~~
morganvachon
The terms "fake 3D" and "2.5D" in reference to Doom and similar games has
nothing to do with sprite based mobs, it's about not having a truly 3D map.
Doom's maps were drawn in 2D top-down with a height variable for any wall or
platform. You couldn't have one room above another, which is why elevators in
the game were solid (you couldn't stand under the floor). The various level
editors for Doom based games looked like primitive 2D CAD programs.

Quake was a whole new paradigm, it was based on a true 3D engine and its maps
were generated in three dimensions. You could stand under stairs, under the
room above, and underneath lifts.

~~~
leoc
It's surely both the sprite-based monsters and the "2.5D" world that justify
DOOM's "2.5D/fake 3D" label, though indeed more the latter. (System Shock was
a transitional example of sprite monsters in an otherwise full-3D world:
[https://youtu.be/CGKidgwcalM?list=PLqqLcEJ9bUtNedMdW64WioyV9...](https://youtu.be/CGKidgwcalM?list=PLqqLcEJ9bUtNedMdW64WioyV9Pgdsxkj9&t=108)
)

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biosed
"Glass, which reflects everything around it" except the character standing in
front of it! It seems like it is over done but not done properly. I know it is
a demo but still, its trying so hard!

~~~
sbarre
Quake 2 did not have a rendered character model because it's a first-person
shooter, so you never see yourself.

If you look at the water reflections, you will however see your gun model and
a disembodied/floating hand holding it.

~~~
biosed
ahhh, didn't realise. Gun thing is mad

~~~
jerf
TIL Quake 2 is a sequel to The Addams Family.

Somehow... it almost works....

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qwerty456127
> id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing gamers a new single-player
> campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we played for
> years on pitifully-slow 56K modems, and a jaw-dropping engine

As for me Quake 2 was kind of a disappointment after Duke Nukem 3D. Only Half-
Life brought back the depth Duke Nukem 3D had. E.g. seeing something like a
ventilation cover and not being able to break it and climb through felt
infuriating.

~~~
scruffyherder
Honestly Quake 2's biggest feature was going open source.

When I was porting Quake 2 to MS-DOS, I have to admit that it's the most I
ever played of it. It really fell into Carmak's view that stories have no
place in gaming.

It's a shame Valve found a much bigger market than games, but it leaves the
mantle for others to pick up.

~~~
qwerty456127
> stories have no place in gaming

What does this mean? Being told and participating in a story has always been
by far the primary thing I play a game for. Interactive visual fiction
experience inducing compassion and involvement bundled with moderate
challenge, a degree of freedom and realism (that's why I don't like rail-
nailed heavily scripted games) is what I want of a game. The visual part
should be reasonable (mostly needed for the atmosphere) and controls should be
convenient. In my opinion Half-Life and Fallout (all the parts) were the best
games I ever played. The story unveiling and the sense of helping people in
the imaginary world heroically (something that is a way too hard and dangerous
for an average Joe to do in the real life where you can't save&load) and
exploration are the things that make a game addictive for me.

~~~
scruffyherder
It's an old Carmack quote:

> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there,
> but it's not that important.

It's why DooM was such an incredible novelty of fast paced 3d shooter, and
Quake... Well.. Its devoid of character.

It's why HL & Fallout are so beloved.

I'm 100% with you

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andybak
No mention of how to download it - either in the negative "You can't..." or
positive.

Seems a strange omission.

~~~
geoah
The creator's website ie mentioned on the article, and code is available on
his github[2].

> As Christoph states on his site [1] ...

[1] [http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt](http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt) [2]
[https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt](https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt)

~~~
andybak
That's q2vkpt. It sounds like Quake II RTX is built on top of that but with
more features.

~~~
arianvanp
No I think they are one and the same. q2vpkt is built on top of
VK_NV_ray_tracing which is the Vulkan interface to RTX. It won't run on non-
nvidia hardware afaik

~~~
Strom
They're not the same.

 _“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!_

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iofiiiiiiiii
This looks like RTX versus Quake2 software renderer, so the pictures are
somewhat deceptive as they do not use the more powerful original Quake2
renderers.

I would be interested how RTX compares to the other Quake2 renderers that it
originally came with.

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hellofunk
Is this ray tracing or path tracing? I'd think that real-time path tracing
would still be hard/impossible in real-time considering the number of samples,
but I'm not sure. People throw around these terms interchangeably which
complicates the discussion, though the algorithms have notable departures from
each other.

~~~
seanalltogether
I thought path tracing was just ray tracing with additional random scatters
traced, is it not?

~~~
dahart
Depends on who you ask, the term is overloaded now.

These days, it does tend to mean doing global illumination using ray tracing.

Originally, the term “path tracing” was used to refer to taking a single
random scatter at every step along a path of connected segments, as opposed to
the idea of taking multiple random scatters at a point and averaging them,
recursively. It’s a way of thinking of Monte Carlo rendering as taking one
sample in a very high dimensional space - where a chain of ray segments, or
“path” is a single sample - rather than thinking of each ray segment
separately as a sample.

Ray tracing, FWIW, can sometimes refer to situations where you’re not even
rendering. It has a more general meaning of doing line based visibility
queries, which you can use for lots of things.

~~~
hellofunk
If I’m not mistaken, for your last paragraph, general visibility tests for
lines that does not otherwise involve actual rendering is typically just
called ray casting.

~~~
dahart
You’re not mistaken, ray casting would be more common, but ray tracing is also
used. This is especially true among people that design path tracing renderers
where we consider “ray tracing” to be a visibility primitive. “Trace a ray”
and “cast a ray” are synonymous. I also think using “ray tracing” for
visibility might start become more popular now with RTX hardware since the
“ray tracing” hardware only provides the visibility test, not a renderer.

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woodrowbarlow
can someone help me understand what "ray tracing" means in this case?

i've read a few technical articles about ray-tracing, but they mostly describe
it as a rudimentary (largely outdated) way of achieving 3d effects with
relatively little code, and with severe limitations (walls must be
orthonormal, changes in elevation require extra work, etc.). i understand ray-
tracing at this level (break the view into columns, set the fill height of the
column according to the distance of the ray).

then i see marketing-style articles like this one that use the same term to
describe advanced lighting effects, material reflections, etc. and i don't
understand the technological jump. what am i missing?

edit: i was thinking of "ray casting", not "ray tracing". thank you for the
corrections below.

~~~
kllrnohj
What you are describing sounds more like ray _casting_ than ray tracing.

Ray casting is the old Wolfenstein 3D look:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting)

Ray tracing is what Pixar uses for Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_\(graphics\))

And then the new hotness for offline rendering is Path Tracing, which is a
form really good but really hard to accelerate form of ray tracing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing)

And yes fundamentally all of these are "shoot rays out from the camera", hence
the very specific terminology used for each to disambiguate which approach to
shooting out rays from the camera is being used and what happens when rays hit
a thing.

~~~
tntn
I'm pretty sure toy story 1 didn't use ray tracing. Iirc cars was the first
that did.

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yedpodtrzitko
That looks really impressive from both technical and also marketing point of
view. Especially the latter one keeps nVidia ahead of AMD. As much as I like
AMD, they need to step up their game somehow.

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cdnsteve
How do I get to play this again? Was my favorite FPS game of all time.

~~~
Freak_NL
Buy the game on Steam or gog.com, and use the assets with any client you like
(on practically any operating system) such as:
[https://yamagi.org/quake2/](https://yamagi.org/quake2/)

Of course that doesn't get you this ray tracing thingy, although you might be
able to run that when they release it and if your hardware supports it.

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sabujp
[https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt/](https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt/)

~~~
Strom
That's the source for Q2VKPT. I wonder if the source for Quake II RTX will
also be released, which is the main target of discussion in this nVidia
article and builds upon Q2VKPT.

~~~
mattnewport
They said at GTC it will but they haven't given a date for when yet.

------
PorterDuff
This kind of demo always makes me think of how long it used to take to render
a single frame of anything non-trivial.

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pier25
So will this be available to purchase?

~~~
3o4xkp
It's open source: [http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/](http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/)

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leowoo91
"We are not faking it" \- how about the hardware? Is it exact same that
consumer could buy?

~~~
lanevorockz
RTX is based on the Turing architecture that is a pretty amazing beast. The
technology of raytracing has been around or a long time through iray what
nvidia did is to bake in the necessary formats, neat interface and slight
hardware adjustments.

~~~
leowoo91
I only worry about the number of cores being used in these demos. Tech might
be same but it's quite possible Nvidia could use their high-energy prototypes
to enhance the results. There is no restrictions on that. Clear statements
like, "we are using the exact same RTX card we are shipping to consumer in
September" would really be a selling point for me.

~~~
tntn
I think Titan RTX is a "perfect die," so to speak, so even if they used the
maximum number of cores they possibly could for this demo, that same silicon
is for sale.

~~~
leowoo91
Looking at the Titan's price range, that's something I would effort "max" for
luxury gaming, only if it can give those exact results.

