An impressive technology which was launched, not to long ago by Nvidia in 2018, called Ray Tracing and has been featured in their new line of RTX Graphics cards. The technology has found its way into a few big titles namely Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus. The big news to expand on this technology in gaming has managed to find its home now with a remastered Quake 2 from legendary developer, ID Software.
There is really some great news featured around this announcement. The biggest being that another game has joined the line of Ray Tracing featured game titles, there will be a free Demo to try out on both Windows and Linux platforms and there will be a full version of the RTX version from Nvidia’s website in an easily installable executable provided that you own the original title.
There will be noticeable featured improvements to the game which includes but not limited to:
- 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
Nvidia will also be releasing the source code for the new RTX game freely for all modders and the community in general to mess around with.
The minimum specifications of your machine to run Quake 2 RTX, as presented by Nvidia, is as follows:
- OS: Windows 7 64-bit or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i3-3220, or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, or higher
- Storage: 2GB available space
If you have what it takes, assuming your hardware does as well, then head over to the Nvidia website come the 6th of June to download this amazing classic and experience the next generation of Graphics computing.
Further information regarding the Quake 2 RTX release, you can visit the Nvidia Website here
Source: