Back at GDC earlier this year, Nvidia debuted a demo that floored many attendees with a revisualization of one of the most beloved classics in the first-person shooter genre. The surprising footage was of a fully remastered and overhauled Quake II, featuring Nvidia’s newest ray-tracing technology powered by RTX graphics cards.
A few months have passed, and now Nvidia wants to make sure that gamers who own the title can experience this remastering, too. The standalone game, called Quake II RTX, includes the first three levels of the classic first-person shooter completely for free. You do, however, need to be able to run it, which means that RTX cards are an absolute must, along with some GTX cards that are updated to run software-applied ray-tracing. Good news if you own the game already though; the standalone title will apply its graphical enhancements to your whole copy of Quake II, which means that you will get to enjoy ray-tracing across the whole campaign and against others in online multiplayer.
Check out the remastering in action right below, as Nvidia released a trailer of what we can expect from Quake II RTX.
Nvidia also states that they plan on releasing the source code for the ray-traced remaster on GitHub, which will help interested modders in expanding upon their existing work. This will help players who want to remaster mods and total conversion packages for Quake II as well.
Here are the highlights for the RTX remaster, which is set for release on June 6. You can check out Nvidia’s newsfeed as well which includes the entirety of the post right here.
- Improved Global Illumination rendering, with three selectable quality presets, including two-bounce GI
- Multiplayer support
- Time of day options that radically change the appearance of some levels
- New weapon models & textures
- New dynamic environments (Stroggos surface, and space)
- Better physically based atmospheric scattering, including settings for Stroggos sky
- Real-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 technology
- All 3,000+ original game textures have been updated with a mix of Q2XP mod-pack textures and our own enhancements
- Updated effects with new sprites and particle animations
- Dynamic lighting for items such as blinking lights, signs, switches, elevators and moving objects
- Caustics approximation to improve water lighting effects
- High-quality screenshot mode that makes your screenshots look even better
- Support for the old OpenGL renderer, enabling you to switch between RTX ON and RTX OFF
- Cylindrical projection mode for wide-angle field of view on widescreen displays
Quake II RTX is set to be released by Nvidia on June 6 for free. You can check out more details about the impending release here.
