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Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

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51–60 of 169 posts

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#51
post #9

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.

Now it's not like it's only an engine change, for this to work they added PBR layers (metalness, emission, normal, yada yada) to all textures here, and that's a big artistic work. That said… gimme gimme gimme Half Life 1, plssssssss :D !

Maybe teams could use tools like AI Gigapixel (discussed on here yesterday) to upsample older textures?

I agree with you that there is asset work to be done, but I bet there are tools out there that can simplify and automate this process quite a bit today.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#52
post #44

"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!

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.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#55
post #8

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

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.

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.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#56
post #49

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.

Not Glide mode? ;)

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.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's actually due to many factors To add to this point, at 1:35 in the video they compare with / without volumetric ligthing except, well, volumetric lighting has been used in games for a while now. The "before" should show a non-RTX lighting instead of just nothing at all.

I remember one of the big selling points of the Dreamcast in 1998 was volumetric lighting.

Unreal, a Quake 2 contemporary, already had it and managed it on meager hardware like P200MMX

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#58
post #49

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.

yeah this exactly. I was half way through playing QII first time round when I went from Software to a VooDooII. I'll never forget firing a plasma rifle down a tunnel and watching the lighting effects coming off the bolt as it went down tunnel. There hasn't been such a step change in graphical capability as those days of going from a software renderer to a hardware one. (also at the same time, was unreal... I never understood why that one room near the start was "slippery" until I got that VooDooII and suddenly that room had a mirror finish and the slipperyness fell into place. I think real time ray tracing in games is now that next step change but even then, nowhere near as dramatic as software to hardware was back in the day.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#59
post #49

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.

Not Glide mode? ;)

Quake and Quake II didn't actually use Glide but a MiniGL wrapper for translating the OpenGL calls.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#60
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" elaborate fakery of 3D. One of examples of the ruse: a level was basically a (floor, ceiling) height map, and there could be no two overlapping rooms one above the other. On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D, including an OpenGL backend and all that. That's o…

> A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" Double nitpick: Duke Nukem could actually have stacked floors and bridges over other playable areas. As such, if it didn’t use “real” 3D, its 2.5D scheme were considerately more elaborate than Doom or Wolfenstein.

Yes, but I remember you still had to use a really contrived way of explaining that 3d 'geometry' on the editor (BUILD.exe).

Basically you still drew in 2d but you could overlap rooms with other lines that wouldn't intersect with any already existing lines, and that would configure 'a room above/below the current room'. Then you had to slope the floor until it actually connected with the newer room.

It was pretty strange but yeah, some people built insanely detailed things with Duke3D :-)

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