Quake 1 receives a ray tracing mod

[Daniel Sims]

Cool stuff: After Nvidia added ray tracing to Quake II, many wondered why no one brought the feature to its predecessor. A prolific modder has now released a conversion to fill that gap, while asking fans to wait a little longer for another highly-anticipated project.

Sultim "sultim_t" Tsyrendashiev is back, adding real-time path tracing to id Software's 1996 classic Quake. The mod's initial reveal was a surprise addition to a trailer announcing a delay on the Half-Life 1 path tracing project in January.

The new Quake mod is available on Tsyrendashiev's GitHub and works with the original 1996 release and 2021 remaster. Tsyrendashiev based his project on vkQuake --a Vulkan conversion of QuakeSpasm.

Users installing the Steam edition of Quake can quickly apply the mod by downloading and unzipping its archive and then running the vkQuake executable, which should automatically detect the Steam folder.

To manually install on non-Steam editions, copy the game's PAK files and music folder into a new folder called "id1," located in the same directory as the vkQuake executable. Make sure to overwrite the old cfg file with a new one. Players with RTX graphics cards should install DLSS 2.0 by downloading the dll file and unzipping the RayTracedGL1-DLSS zip file into the same folder as vkQuake.

This mod is the third ray-tracing upgrade for a classic FPS that Tsyrendashiev unveiled this year. In April, he released a conversion for the original Doom. He also has one available for Serious Sam.

Tsyrendashiev has since updated the Doom mod to support AMD GPUs. Those who initially passed on it because they don't own RTX cards may want to try it. For those without DLSS, running the game at retro resolutions helps with performance.

Another classic first-person game receiving ray tracing this year is Portal, courtesy of Nvidia and its new RTX Remix pipeline. The company hopes more modders will use its new toolset to add ray tracing and other features to forward-rendered DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 titles. Remix has already proven helpful in adding improved textures and DLSS 3 (or DLSS 2) to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and the original Mount & Blade. The Portal conversion will be freely available to owners of the game on PC in November.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/96229-quake-1-receives-ray-tracing-mod.html

 

[VitalyT]

Meh! Everything after Quake II RTX looks second-class.

The ancient textures in Quake I prevent RTX from shining.

 

[ZedRM]

Users installing the Steam edition of Quake can quickly apply the mod by downloading and unzipping its archive and then running the vkQuake executable, which should automatically detect the Steam folder.

It should be noted that this mod works flawlessly on the GOG version as well. Oh yeah.

The ancient textures in Quake I prevent RTX from shining.

Nonsense. Did you actually watch that video? Maybe download it and try it out? Go on, we'll wait for you to catch up..

 

[envirovore]

Been playing this for the last couple days now.
Certainly changes up the ambience. Lobbing grenades to light up around a corner is neat.

 

[Nobina]

Soon we'll be getting ray traced screen savers and wallpapers just not ray tracing for new games that is well implemented.

 

[bviktor]

The ancient textures in Quake I prevent RTX from shining.

Exactly. We need high-res textures, not this gimmick.

 

[bviktor]

It should be noted that this mod works flawlessly on the GOG version as well. Oh yeah.

Nonsense. Did you actually watch that video? Maybe download it and try it out? Go on, we'll wait for you to catch up..

I watched the video and 100% agree with him.

 

[ZedRM]

I watched the video and 100% agree with him.

Go do your own thing then. The rest of us will enjoy..

 

[Hodor]

I'll wait for the ray traced version of Tetris.

 

[Aido72]

It should be noted that this mod works flawlessly on the GOG version as well. Oh yeah.

Nonsense. Did you actually watch that video? Maybe download it and try it out? Go on, we'll wait for you to catch up..

Does anyone have this working on the Steam version of Quake 1? As in, able to use the updated Steam versions ingame menu (with room codes etc)?

 

[Norguard]

Meh! Everything after Quake II RTX looks second-class.

The ancient textures in Quake I prevent RTX from shining.

It's not the textures that are the problem. Valheim looks great and has low-res textures. Amid Evil looks great and has low-res textures.

The difference is that Valheim and Amid Evil have additional texture information, for different lighting pipelines. Metals look like metal; fabrics look like fabric. Smooth surfaces look shiny. These are additional textures that give additional information to the lighting engine. Higher resolution textures in Quake, without normal/roughness/metalness/height maps and the like will look even more flat than the low-rez textures, because at higher resolutions, your eyes will expect the light to behave as realistically as the textures look.

 

[Norguard]

Does anyone have this working on the Steam version of Quake 1? As in, able to use the updated Steam versions ingame menu (with room codes etc)?

It doesn't work like that. This is like a completely different engine that runs the Quake data; it's not a modification for the Kex engine that Nightdive used for new Quake.