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

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

#91

Post by tachyonbeam »

mikepurvis wrote: post #90
tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #2

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.

Hopefully it doesn't become one of those annoying tropes, though. Like Photoshop lens flares— every game has to have a bunch of arbitrarily reflective materials and light shafts just because the hardware now makes it possible.

When bump mapping was starting to become a thing, every surface had to look ultra glossy for a while (example: http://mojolabs.nz/screenshot.php?id=1740). Eventually the excitement subsided and people used this effect more tastefully. I think most people are just happy with more natural looking lighting though.

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

#92

Post by mikepurvis »

Wohlf wrote: post #66
pornel wrote: post #38

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".

I've noticed something similar with a lot of the game remakes from a few years ago, particularly the N64 Zelda remakes on 3DS. The remasters look how you remember the games back in the day, but if you compared them side by side the remakes look vastly better.

Zelda 64 is a particularly interesting case, though. As such a beloved title with a long-standing fan following, there has been an almost endless parade of remakes/demakes over the 20 years since it came out.

If you thought the official 3DS one was pretty, wait until you see the fan work done on a UE4 version:

https://youtu.be/OrMRjK_5RRU?t=113

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

#93

Post by dahart »

mattnewport wrote: post #85
cyxxon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that VR is the next step like this. Even taking an "old" title like Skyrim drives home that no matter how nice the renderer makes it look on a screen, it is still flat. With VR you are in the place. Does the raytracing look really, really nice? Yes, definitely. Is it that much better? I don't think so (personal opinion, of course)...

Working in VR, I think ray tracing is really going to come into its own with VR. Some of the effects that are mostly just nice visuals on a monitor actually make VR more usable. Accurate contact shadows for example are super important to our brain when picking up and putting down objects off surfaces to help get an accurate sense of distance and are extremely hard to do well with rasterization based techniques but th…

This is a good point I hadn’t thought of that much. Ray tracing is more easily able to get to ‘stereo correctness’ than all the screen space effects and other great tricks that have worked so well for games.

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

#94

Post by jacobush »

qplex wrote: post #59
jacobush wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Glide mode? ;)

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

YES! Now I remember. Unreal Tournament used glide though. UT was my vice.

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

#95

Post by dahart »

mbel wrote: post #19
narrator wrote: post #15

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.

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.

The word fake doesn’t bother me, but maybe “limited 3d” would be a better term for it. The 3d it had was still correct 3d, sure, it was just limited in what kinds of 3d it could render, unlike the full 3d games that came soon after.

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

#97

Post by PavlikPaja »

partiallypro wrote: post #77
tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #2

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.

It's cool, but even back in the day people that competitively played Quake 2 & 3 would turn down every detail to be very low, sans the resolution. In part because it helped with lag, but it also made spotting enemies much easier. The lighting in this demo is very nice, but at least in the Quake world, no one would really use it because it's very distracting, specifically the lighting.

They would as you could use the lighting to spot enemies you can't see directly, like you sometimes can in e.g. CSGO.

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

#98

Post by dahart »

seanalltogether wrote: post #68
hellofunk wrote: post #40

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.

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

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.

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

#99

Post by PavlikPaja »

mbel wrote: post #19
narrator wrote: post #15

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.

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.

It wasn't really 3D, you couldn't look up or down at all in the original doom I think and in the later games you could, but it got all horribly distorted, as the engine couldn't actually show the scene from different perspective.
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