NVIDIA officially announced at Computex 2019 that their Quake II RTX ray-traced remaster of the classic FPS game will be released on June 6th, 2019. Owners of a GeForce RTX graphics card, or other capable hardware, can experience the first 3 levels of the game for free, fully remastered with path-traced graphics and a variety of other enhancements. Better yet, if you own a copy of Quake II, the campaign can be played in its entirety, and against others in online multiplayer. Read more for a video walkthrough with NVIDIA Jensen Huang and a behind-the-scenes clip.
Features include improved Global Illumination rendering, complete 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.
“As Quake II RTX uses path tracing for the rendering of virtually everything, a GeForce RTX GPU with performance-accelerating RT Cores is strongly recommended. As detailed in our ray tracing deep-dive, high ray tracing workloads necessitate the use of RT Cores, and Quake II RTX has the highest workloads of any ray-traced game released to date,” said NVIDIA on its website.
