[SOLVED] Ray Tracing Confusion

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Solution
RTX aka Ray tracing, is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the light path as pixels in an image plane, and simulating the effects with virtual objects. The easiest way to think of ray tracing is to look around you, right now. The objects you’re seeing are illuminated by beams of light. Now turn that around and follow the path of those beams backwards from your eye to the objects that light interacts with. That’s ray tracing.

Ray tracing involves tracing the path of a ray (a beam of light) within a 3D world. Project a ray for a single pixel into the 3D world, figure out what polygon that ray hits first, then color it appropriately. In practice, many more rays per pixel are necessary to get a good...
Thank you! I will jump on that. Oh, and yes, I just bought a RTX 2070 hoping it would allow max settings at 1080p on the few RT games out so far. Waiting mostly for Atomic Heart.

Just some heads-up. Quake II RTX is now available on Steam and direct download...

It's FREE as well.....Quake II RTX is now available on Steam, allowing PC gamers to push the latest PC hardware to its limits, thanks to the powers of path tracing and an open sourced game from 1997. Those who prefer standalone executables can download Quake II RTX from Nvidia directly.

Quake II RTX comes with access to the first three levels of Quake II, with owners of Quake II on Steam gaining access to the game's multiplayer and the remainder of the game's single player modes. This extra content can be added to Quake II RTX using the game's installer. This free version includes the 3 levels from the original shareware distribution, and Quake 2 RTX is also compatible with the full game (so those owning it will be able to experience the entire game with ray tracing).


 
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That's cool. Quake 2 is a pretty good old school shooter.....But why implement ray tracing in such an old game ? Less graphic demanding ? :??:

It's all about Nostalgia, is you ask me. That's one of the best old-school FPS of all time. And NO, ray tracing is still demanding on the hardware, despite QUAKE 2 using an older Game engine. Quake II RTX builds on the work of Christoph Schied and the team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, who added ray tracing to Quake II to create Q2VKPT (in turn building upon the Q2PRO code base).

That's why it has been made official now....

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, or higher required....
 
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david_the_guy

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It's all about Nostalgia, is you ask me. That's one of the best old-school FPS of all time. And NO, ray tracing is still demanding on the hardware, despite QUAKE 2 using an older Game engine. Quake II RTX builds on the work of Christoph Schied and the team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, who added ray tracing to Quake II to create Q2VKPT (in turn building upon the Q2PRO code base).

That's why it has been made official now....

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, or higher required....

Nostalgia ?? yeah indeed makes sense, LOL.. Old gaming memories more like....
 
Going by videos, Quake II RTX gets around 20fps at 4K resolution on a 2080 Ti, while still looking like a game from 1997, only with some improved lighting effects that don't look much different from what games had well over a decade ago using other techniques.

Even a 2080 Ti can only handle 1080p well with these effects enabled. That doesn't make for a particularly good showcase of the viability of raytraced lighting effects on this generation of hardware. If performance is going to be poor, the game should at least look good, and 90s-era 3D games don't exactly hold up all that well in the graphics department. Slapping some improved lighting effects on there just makes the rest of the graphical limitations stand out more.
 
Going by videos, Quake II RTX gets around 20fps at 4K resolution on a 2080 Ti, while still looking like a game from 1997, only with some improved lighting effects that don't look much different from what games had well over a decade ago using other techniques.

I agree with this. Ray tracing isn't that impressive, given the performance drop, even on high-end GPUs. I'm not impressed with QUAKE 2's implementation either. There is too much hype surrounding RTX these days.
 
It was likely only added to Quake II due to the game's source code being publicly available. So, unless the publisher of the game were re-releasing it, you probably won't see that happening. And with the system requirements being so high and the performance impact so large, I can't see many publishers considering it worth the investment, at least until faster raytracing hardware becomes readily available.
 

lux1109

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Yeah but still, it's not worth the performance drop, just for some extra eye candy stuff, which most of us are going to ignore, IMO. Ray tracing is still very demanding on current Hardware, though in future things might change.

Okay, can't disagree on that point....I just played Quake 2 RTX, and what you say is correct as well to an extent. Even the performance is not optimal for such an old game.