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Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y agoThe 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- navaati 8y agoNow it's not like it's only an engine change, for this to work they added PBR layers (metalness, emission, normal, yada yada) to all textures here, and that's a big artistic work. That said… gimme gimme gimme Half Life 1, plssssssss :D !
- kowdermeister 8y agoHL1: Yes please, it would look so cool. > they added PBR layers and fluid simulation for explosions I'd rolling in joy for Max Payne and GTA San Andreas :)
- LeonM 8y agoHL1 already has a modern remake, check out 'Black Mesa' on Steam. It's really good.
- thecatspaw 8y agoAs someone passionate about hl1, I dont like Black mesa. Yes it looks nice, but gameplay wise it seems lacking to me. It feels very slow to move, bhopping has been nerfed to death. It feels more like a reboot than a remaster
- crysin 8y agoFrom what I remember of Black Mesa, it felt more like Half-Life 2, control wise, than Half-Life. So for people who played Half-Life 2 first, Black Mesa probably feels more natural.
- yellowapple 8y agoThis is unsurprising, since they're both on the Source engine.
- sbarre 8y agoMaybe teams could use tools like AI Gigapixel (discussed on here yesterday) to upsample older textures? I agree with you that there is asset work to be done, but I bet there are tools out there that can simplify and automate this process quite a bit today.
- codetrotter 8y agoI couldn’t find the tool you mentioned but I found a thread on another site about a GAN that can upscale images, and using that one to generate highres textures. https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-being-used-to-generate-hq-textures-for-older-games-you-can-do-it-yourself.88272/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-being-us...
- sbarre 8y agoThis was the article linked in the thread from yesterday.. It relates to upsampling TV show special effects but I think similar tools could be used: https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/03/remastering-star-trek-deep-space-nine.html https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/03/remastering-star-trek...
- sbarre 8y agoAnd here's the AI Gigapixel tool: https://topazlabs.com/ai-gigapixel/ https://topazlabs.com/ai-gigapixel/
- pizza234 8y agoI'm very skeptical. This is not just RTT; there's a big amount of rework. Likely, any old game would look significantly better with such development effort (in other words, with any good remastering). This could be considered a great market stunt - the graphical improvement is touted to be due to RTX (ray tracing), while it's actually due to many factors. On top of that, it misleads people into thinking that this type of improvement is typical of ray tracing, and that it comes at virtually no cost, while currently, ray tracing takes a big performance hit, and it's generally hard to notice. Q2VKPT is close to the concept "improved with ray tracing", and while certainly impressive, it doesn't yield the same "AMAZING!" effect.
- karrotwaltz 8y ago> it's actually due to many factors To add to this point, at 1:35 in the video they compare with / without volumetric ligthing except, well, volumetric lighting has been used in games for a while now. The "before" should show a non-RTX lighting instead of just nothing at all.
- robin_reala 8y agoI remember one of the big selling points of the Dreamcast in 1998 was volumetric lighting.
- krige 8y agoUnreal, a Quake 2 contemporary, already had it and managed it on meager hardware like P200MMX
- TomBombadildoze 8y agoIf you consider a slide show "managing it", then sure.
- jl6 8y agoMy P200MMX with a Voodoo 2 managed it just fine.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yogthos 8y agoI would love to see a kickstarter or something to create high quality assets for Open Arena, and add raytracing. Personally, I find that Quake 3 gameplay is more fun than any modern shooter that I've played. It's fast paced, and really well streamlined. It's just pure adrenaline. Adding things like health regen, cover, alternate fire modes, and so on ultimately just distracts from the action in my opinion. We don't really have any more games like Quake nowadays.
- dkrikun 8y agotry reflex arena
- partiallypro 8y agoIt'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.
- PavlikPaja 8y agoThey would as you could use the lighting to spot enemies you can't see directly, like you sometimes can in e.g. CSGO.
- dahart 8y agoI would use ray tracing to get a non-linear camera, specifically so I could have a wider field of view with less distortion than the linear camera & wide fov. Back on Q3, everyone would use 120 or 130 degree fov because that was the best compromise between seeing things to your side and everything getting squished into the center of your screen. If I could have played with 180, I would have. Your lighting point is reasonable in the sense that this demo was made to demonstrate the dramatic lighting without respect to gameplay. On the other hand games are already clearly going toward HDR and physical and dramatic lighting. If Quake had HDR lighting, it would look just as good but it would be less distracting because it would have been directed and designed to support the gameplay. This version also has dynamic adaptation which would have been awesome to have back in the day - some of the dark areas are too dark and it’s great to have the lighting automatically adjust so that at least I can see.
- mikepurvis 8y agoHopefully 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.
- tachyonbeam 8y agoWhen 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 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.
- Roritharr 8y agoDigital Foundry has an amazing analysis video and have talked to the original creator, highly enjoyable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRCAfdBMe2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRCAfdBMe2Y
- andybak 8y agoNo mention of how to download it - either in the negative "You can't..." or positive. Seems a strange omission.
- geoah 8y agoThe creator's website ie mentioned on the article, and code is available on his github[2]. > As Christoph states on his site [1] ... [1] http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt [2] https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt
- andybak 8y agoThat's q2vkpt. It sounds like Quake II RTX is built on top of that but with more features.
- arianvanp 8y agoNo I think they are one and the same. q2vpkt is built on top of VK_NV_ray_tracing which is the Vulkan interface to RTX. It won't run on non-nvidia hardware afaik
- Strom 8y agoThey're not the same. “But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. A lot. We’ve introduced real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight and indirect illumination; refraction on water and glass; emissive, reflective and transparent surfaces; normal and roughness maps for added surface detail; particle and laser effects for weapons; procedural environment maps featuring mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed; a flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk; an improved denoiser; SLI support (hands-up if you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI back in the day); Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more!
- steinuil 8y ago
- apk-d 8y agoRtx really shines when applied to a low-fidelity game like Q2. The difference isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and tricks approximates physical lighting closely, though. I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption) raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users, as it has been with many other hardware advancements.
- jplayer01 8y agoBut... That's the biggest benefit of raytracing/path tracing. It's why the movie industry is already all-in on it and has been for years. It's just in games where for some reason gamers don't understand the benefits and are so eager to dismiss it if they don't immediately see everything look 10x more amazing or realistic, entirely missing the point.
- billfruit 8y agoPerhaps many games do not require realistic light, rather some type of simplistic model serves gameplay well enough, I do not know what kind of light modeling was used in Sunset Overdrive, but that type of oversaturated lighting works for some games.
- kuu 8y agoI guess better tools for developers could mean in a benefit for the player: less time working on one thing could mean more time in others, giving more room to improvement. I guess...
- apk-d 8y agoI'm somewhat sceptical because I'm not really seeing this happen anywhere throughout the software development industry. Sure, we get more software than ever, and we get it faster and cheaper, but it's all bloated low-quality (web\electron) apps that are often less usable than their ages-old counterparts. Same thing is happening to games in some extent - most developers choose development speed and convenience over performance.
- leowoo91 8y ago"We are not faking it" - how about the hardware? Is it exact same that consumer could buy?
- dogma1138 8y agoYes.
- lanevorockz 8y agoRTX is based on the Turing architecture that is a pretty amazing beast. The technology of raytracing has been around or a long time through iray what nvidia did is to bake in the necessary formats, neat interface and slight hardware adjustments.
- leowoo91 8y agoI only worry about the number of cores being used in these demos. Tech might be same but it's quite possible Nvidia could use their high-energy prototypes to enhance the results. There is no restrictions on that. Clear statements like, "we are using the exact same RTX card we are shipping to consumer in September" would really be a selling point for me.
- tntn 8y agoI think Titan RTX is a "perfect die," so to speak, so even if they used the maximum number of cores they possibly could for this demo, that same silicon is for sale.
- leowoo91 8y agoLooking at the Titan's price range, that's something I would effort "max" for luxury gaming, only if it can give those exact results.
- narrator 8y agoThis 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.
- mbel 8y agoWhat 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.
- kkapelon 8y agoDoom used 2D sprites, so "fake 3d" if you ask me.
- mbel 8y agoSo does plethora of today's AAA titles for subtle details like particle effects, grass and others.
- kkapelon 8y agoyes. but sprites (i.e. enemies and weapons) are the primary method of interaction with Doom. Grass and particle effects are secondary.... How many FPS AAA titles today use sprites for enemies and weapons?
- jandrese 8y agoFunnily enough the sprite based enemies were a real strength for Doom compared to many of the fully 3D games that came out in the next generation, including Quake. Because rendering full 3D enemies was taxing for the hardware you couldn't put too many of them on the screen at once. In some games more than 2 or 3 would cause it to chug. So you only ever run across one or two enemies at once in the games, unlike Doom that wasn't afraid to throw a swarm of pinkies at you because you just picked up the chainsaw.
- iofiiiiiiiii 8y agoThis looks like RTX versus Quake2 software renderer, so the pictures are somewhat deceptive as they do not use the more powerful original Quake2 renderers. I would be interested how RTX compares to the other Quake2 renderers that it originally came with.
- mstade 8y agoI hope raytracing will enable some remasters of amazing old games. No need for new content, changing the stories or gameplay, just vastly improved graphics. I always preferred the Quake series for multiplayer, but Half-Life was great single player. Max Payne would be a great replay with better graphics. Some old flight sims like Jane's WWII Fighters, X-Wing v Tie Fighter, Wing Commander... I'd pay cash monies for this.
- pornel 8y agoI 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".
- kuzehanka 8y agoPath tracing has huge wow factor. The problem with RTX is that on current gen hardware it runs at laughably low sample rates and the result is very noisy even after DLDN. Games are handling this by dialling the amplitude of RTX effects way down and having a smoothing pass. After all that is done, the wow effect is gone and you're just left with a more dynamic version of the same or worse aesthetics that we're already used to. I expect it'll truly take off on next gen hardware, whenever that rolls out. Here's what RTX+DLDN actually looks like if not dialled down and smoothed: https://youtu.be/CuoER1DwYLY?t=553 https://youtu.be/CuoER1DwYLY?t=553 My takeaway is yes that quake 2 demo looks really cool, but you just know that they used every black magic hack in the book to get there, and most of it can't be replicated in a modern high fidelity game. It's definitely not a case of flicking an 'RTX on' switch.
- echeese 8y agoWhat's DLDN? I tried Googling it with some relevant keywords but it just brings me back to this comment.
- kuzehanka 8y agoDeep learning denoiser. I don't know if NVIDIA came up with some marketing term for it. It's what allows RTX to produce meaningful images at all despite the renderer running at 0.5-2 samples per pixel which looks little better than random noise. I kind of assumed they'd call it DLDN because they called their deep learning supersampling DLSS. I guess not, go figure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjTPV2pXY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjTPV2pXY0
- Wohlf 8y ago
- hellofunk 8y agoIs 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.
- crote 8y ago0:36 in the video, "all based on path tracing". Easy tell: the soft shadows, volumetric lighting, indirect lighting, complex shaders. Some of it could probably be faked, but it's trivial with path tracing. About speed: it's still very hard to do real-time, but it seems like denoising algorithms are getting good enough that it's getting doable. Keep in mind that it is a game, so small graphical glitches aren't that big of a deal.
- seanalltogether 8y agoI thought path tracing was just ray tracing with additional random scatters traced, is it not?
- dahart 8y agoDepends 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.
- hellofunk 8y agoIf I’m not mistaken, for your last paragraph, general visibility tests for lines that does not otherwise involve actual rendering is typically just called ray casting.
- biosed 8y ago"Glass, which reflects everything around it" except the character standing in front of it! It seems like it is over done but not done properly. I know it is a demo but still, its trying so hard!
- sbarre 8y agoQuake 2 did not have a rendered character model because it's a first-person shooter, so you never see yourself. If you look at the water reflections, you will however see your gun model and a disembodied/floating hand holding it.
- biosed 8y agoahhh, didn't realise. Gun thing is mad
- jerf 8y agoTIL Quake 2 is a sequel to The Addams Family. Somehow... it almost works....
- mikepurvis 8y agoYour gun hand pokes out from the cloak of invisibility you're wearing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nickjj 8y agoWow that's a big difference. It reminds me of what it was like to first see 3dfx OpenGL mode in Quake II when I got a Voodoo graphics card.
- jacobush 8y agoNot Glide mode? ;)
- nickjj 8y agoNow that you mention it, I don't remember if it was opengl or glide, it was over 20 years ago. Same effect tho. I just remember seeing all of the ambient lights and glows and thinking how amazing it looked. Specifically some early campaign map where you're going through dark sewers that had a bunch of little lights that emit a glow. But after the coolness factor wore off, it was back to using the most minimal settings possible to maximize visibility and frame rates to play it online.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoIf it was Voodoo you'd be using Glide. That was their proprietary API. But yeah, the biggest improvement was putting it into Glide/OpenGL and watching all the new lights appear.
- qplex 8y agoQuake and Quake II didn't actually use Glide but a MiniGL wrapper for translating the OpenGL calls.
- jacobush 8y agoYES! Now I remember. Unreal Tournament used glide though. UT was my vice.
- scruffyherder 8y agoThere is a 3DFX Mesa/Sage port http://dk.toastednet.org/Q2DOS/ http://dk.toastednet.org/Q2DOS/ No Glide though, so it won't run under emulation it needs an actual 3dFX card.
- cdnsteve 8y agoHow do I get to play this again? Was my favorite FPS game of all time.
- Freak_NL 8y agoBuy the game on Steam or gog.com, and use the assets with any client you like (on practically any operating system) such as: https://yamagi.org/quake2/ https://yamagi.org/quake2/ Of course that doesn't get you this ray tracing thingy, although you might be able to run that when they release it and if your hardware supports it.
- yedpodtrzitko 8y agoThat looks really impressive from both technical and also marketing point of view. Especially the latter one keeps nVidia ahead of AMD. As much as I like AMD, they need to step up their game somehow.
- quadcore 8y agoThe original textures were done by Adrian Carmack. I think he's a genius as much as John. He was capable of making a difficult theme really work: a mix between dark future and fantasy. Specially fantasy with guns is terribly difficult and I don't recall having seen a game that succeeded in making that mix as well as the Quake series.
- LoSboccacc 8y agowell there's this 40k thing
- gagege 8y agoMaybe this isn't what you're talking about, but Bungie's game Destiny is a pretty great example of medieval fantasy transposed several thousand years into the future.
- jsgo 8y agoIs it? I only played Destiny 2 and from the parts I really got into (pre-expansions), I didn't get a very medieval fantasy vibe at any points. Most of the architecture was fairly modern or alien. Was nice though. Anthem has some buildings that have an older feel out in the freeplay areas, but even that would be a stretch.
- nessus42 8y agoIt's much more apparent in Destiny 1, with the Hive architecture, which is like something out of Mordor. And in the Forsaken expansion to Destiny 2, where The Dreaming City seems like a high-fantasy kingdom, but under attack by evil forces.
- jsgo 8y agoah, nice. Can't remember if it was Hive or a different faction, but while playing the core game of D2, I thought it was nice because the environment you dealt with them reminded me a lot of Alien (without the xenomorph, obviously). I think that was one thing D2 did well: in the core game, there are multiple factions that are pretty distinct so it almost feels like different games at times.
- sabujp 8y agohttps://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt/ https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt/
- Strom 8y agoThat's the source for Q2VKPT. I wonder if the source for Quake II RTX will also be released, which is the main target of discussion in this nVidia article and builds upon Q2VKPT.
- mattnewport 8y agoThey said at GTC it will but they haven't given a date for when yet.
- PorterDuff 8y agoThis kind of demo always makes me think of how long it used to take to render a single frame of anything non-trivial.
- woodrowbarlow 8y agocan someone help me understand what "ray tracing" means in this case? i've read a few technical articles about ray-tracing, but they mostly describe it as a rudimentary (largely outdated) way of achieving 3d effects with relatively little code, and with severe limitations (walls must be orthonormal, changes in elevation require extra work, etc.). i understand ray-tracing at this level (break the view into columns, set the fill height of the column according to the distance of the ray). then i see marketing-style articles like this one that use the same term to describe advanced lighting effects, material reflections, etc. and i don't understand the technological jump. what am i missing? edit: i was thinking of "ray casting", not "ray tracing". thank you for the corrections below.
- kllrnohj 8y agoWhat you are describing sounds more like ray casting than ray tracing. Ray casting is the old Wolfenstein 3D look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting Ray tracing is what Pixar uses for Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) And then the new hotness for offline rendering is Path Tracing, which is a form really good but really hard to accelerate form of ray tracing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing And yes fundamentally all of these are "shoot rays out from the camera", hence the very specific terminology used for each to disambiguate which approach to shooting out rays from the camera is being used and what happens when rays hit a thing.
- tntn 8y agoI'm pretty sure toy story 1 didn't use ray tracing. Iirc cars was the first that did.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tntn 8y agoSounds like the first thing you are describing is closer to ray casting. Ray tracing doesn't have the limitations you mention. Roughly speaking, ray tra in techniques are variations on the concept of tracing a ray from the camera back into the screen and seeing where is ends up. The different variations distinguish themselves by what happens at a ray intersection. Classical ray tracing will spawn a shadow ray towards light source. Path tracing will stochastically sample some distribution of ray directions (usually based on a combination of light locations and material properties) in order to do Monte Carlo integration of the rendering equation. There are other variations. Ray tracing (w/ only shadow rays) doesn't give you global illumination. Path tracing (this work) does.
- pier25 8y agoSo will this be available to purchase?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 3o4xkp 8y agoIt's open source: http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/ http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/
- qwerty456127 8y ago> id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing gamers a new single-player campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we played for years on pitifully-slow 56K modems, and a jaw-dropping engine As for me Quake 2 was kind of a disappointment after Duke Nukem 3D. Only Half-Life brought back the depth Duke Nukem 3D had. E.g. seeing something like a ventilation cover and not being able to break it and climb through felt infuriating.
- scruffyherder 8y agoHonestly Quake 2's biggest feature was going open source. When I was porting Quake 2 to MS-DOS, I have to admit that it's the most I ever played of it. It really fell into Carmak's view that stories have no place in gaming. It's a shame Valve found a much bigger market than games, but it leaves the mantle for others to pick up.
- furicane 8y agoQuake 2 is one of the most difficult FPS games to play competitively. I played the game for 10 years, 1998 - 2008. I can tell you're looking at the game from a different perspective (I'm assuming you're referring to its singleplayer), however - its multiplayer component was nothing short of amazing. Game actually takes a huge physical toll on the player due to complex controls (strafe jumps, circle jumps, doublejumps, circle-strafes, occasional rocket / grenade jump), and the movement aspect combined with aim and general awareness made it one of the best games I had honor to play.
- scruffyherder 8y agoPart of the reason I started the DOS port was that the QuakeWorld port had dropped to zero activity. I was trying to validate a different style of building GCC and all the servers were empty. When q2 had shipped out I was so busy working I never had time to play it seriously. Quake 4 felt far more engaging to me. And q3.. I had the tin box set for Linux. Remember that push to make retail Linux gaming a thing? Shame it never panned out.
- 8y ago