News Quake II RTX will be Free, Release June 6

[AndrewFreedman]

Nvidia will make Quake II RTX, a ray-traced re-release of the original, available for free on June 6.


Quake II RTX will be Free, Release June 6 : Read more

 

[nitrium]

Will this look more or less identical to the original or waaaaay betterer? If not, is there any point to this?

 

[JQB45]

I've seen demo's of the development, it looks quite a bit better. Maybe a little to shinny but for free and as far as games go a smallish download I'd get it if I had an RTX capable card.

 

[TerryLaze]

I'd get it if I had an RTX capable card.

Ha your weakness disgusts me...
I'm gonna get it for my 1050ti and laugh at it as it will play it at some 5FPS or something.

 

[JQB45]

Ha your weakness disgusts me...
I'm gonna get it for my 1050ti and laugh at it as it will play it at some 5FPS or something.

Don't think NVidia will allow us to active RTX since we do not have cards that meet the requirements. Which 1050ti do you have?
I have the EVGA GTX 950 FTW.

 

[TerryLaze]

Don't think NVidia will allow us to active RTX since we do not have cards that meet the requirements. Which 1050ti do you have?
I have the EVGA GTX 950 FTW.

Wasn't there some software shenanigans?I mean they ran RTX demos on AMD cards after all.

It's just a slightly OC otherwise normal MSI 1050ti.

 

[cryoburner]

Will this look more or less identical to the original or waaaaay betterer? If not, is there any point to this?

There's a trailer showing comparisons between original and the RTX version. It pretty much looks like a 20+ year old game with some improved lighting effects. They don't appear to have touched the level geometry or animations or anything like that...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unGtBbhaPeU


It's a bit like what Half-Life: Source was to Half Life, though Quake II is far older at this point than half-Life was when its port was released.

Also, the headline is not really accurate saying "Quake II RTX will be free". You are getting a 3-level demo for free. Likely the same Quake II demo that's been available since the late 90s. You have to own a copy of the game if you want to play the whole thing. So, all you are really getting for free is the new renderer.

I suspect the main point is to provide source code to give developers an example of how they could incorporate RTX into their games, since the code for Quake II has been open-sourced for a number of years.

 

[mitch074]

There ARE mods out there that make Quake II look not as old, with AI-assisted upscaled textures and surface improvements - the new renderer makes lighting much better, if you add better textures the game does look much better. Now, it would need more complex 3D models to really be made up to speed.