Quake 2 may be a 22-year-old game and run on just about anything with an electrical current, but that's not what Quake 2 RTX is about. What started out as a mod to Quake 2, by Christoph Schied, known as Q2VKPT (Quake 2 Vulkan Path Tracing) is now a full standalone release thanks to the team at NVIDIA and Lightspeed Studios. While on the surface many are going to instantly dismiss this as a simple marketing tool for NVIDIA to sell more RTX cards and while they're using it for marketing, you simply cannot discount the reality of what is going on here.

In previous RTX titles, there has been been a pick of techniques from the RTX library used in Hybrid Ray Traced rendering; Battlefield V uses Ray Traced Reflections, Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses Ray Traced Shadows, and Metro Exodus uses Ray Traced Global Illumination. But, Quake 2 RTX is entirely ray traced, or path traced rather, meaning there is no traditional rasterization going on here. So essentially, there are zero traditional methods, outside of the geometry being built, here resulting in a pretty intense change of delivery. Sure it's a 22-year-old game but if you don't think what is going on here is an insanely computationally intensive act then you have a bit more homework to do. This is not a simple filter and Quake 2 RTX is not a 22-year-old game, it is all new and not an easy feat to pull off.

Minimum Requirements

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 7 64-bit

Processor: Intel i3-3220 or AMD Equivalent

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2060 or higher

Storage: 2 GB available space

Additional Notes: Vulkan

Quake II RTX will include the first three stages of the main campaign only, but owners of the original release will be able to play the full game with ray tracing enabled. The improvements made on the game include:

Improved Global Illumination rendering, with three selectable quality presets, including two-bounce GIMultiplayer supportTime of day options that radically change the appearance of some levelsNew weapon models & texturesNew dynamic environments (Stroggos surface, and space)Better physically based atmospheric scattering, including settings for Stroggos skyReal-time reflectivity of the player and weapon model on water and glass surfaces, and player model shadows, for owners of the complete game (the original Shareware release does not include player models)Improved ray tracing denoising technologyAll 3,000+ original game textures have been updated with a mix ofQ2XPmod-pack textures and our own enhancementsUpdated effects with new sprites and particle animationsDynamic lighting for items such as blinking lights, signs, switches, elevators and moving objectsCaustics approximation to improve water lighting effectsHigh-quality screenshot mode that makes your screenshots look even betterSupport for the old OpenGL renderer, enabling you to switch between RTX ON and RTX OFFCylindrical projection mode for wide-angle field of view on widescreen displays

Sky Type Changes

Quake 2 RTX does feature the ability to change time of day as well as which world the maps take place on, I've included a few screenshots below from the same time of day (dusk) just to show the difference the type of sky can make. This is useful for those who felt the change in the juxtaposition above and the video below didn't really reflect the original atmosphere of the game since you can run with the original skybox and bring back that sensation.

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Testing Methodology

Since Quake 2 itself is a classic game and has always had its own way of benchmarking we wanted to take it back a bit in the testing methodology with Quake 2 RTX. Rather than set up a repeatable course and go with the traditional AVG, .1%, and .01% lows we're going with just averages as a result of the Time Demo test that you too can run following these steps

From the launch screen hit the (~) keyType timedemo 1 hit 'enter'Type demo demo1hit 'enter' to run the benchmarkAfter benchmark completes his (~) again to see the results

We tested with the game in the first launch configuration that only uses a single bounce of lighting, so global illumination was left at Medium and time of day was dusk. I wouldn't recommend trying to run GI at High for the second bounce unless you are looking for a bad time or taking screenshots. And for those who are wondering why Radeon cards aren't present, I did attempt to get the Vega cards working, but with no luck, perhaps one day RTG will put out a DXR compliant driver.

Quake 2 RTX Settings Used

Test System