Quake II RTX receives HDR and AMD's FSR technology support

[Polycount]

What just happened? Quake II RTX is already a pretty game -- at least, compared to the original -- but a major new patch is set to boost the visuals even more for users with powerful enough rigs, and high-end enough monitors. With the latest update, Quake II RTX has received official support for HDR and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology.

As usual, the update is completely free and features a hefty roster of tweaks, improvements, and bug fixes outside of the headline additions of HDR and FSR. Interestingly, though, it wasn't Quake II RTX's developers that were entirely responsible for the addition of the latter two upgrades. Instead, Lightspeed Studios pulled code from Github user Res2k and added it to Quake II RTX's live development branch.

If you've been living under a rock and haven't heard of FSR yet, it's AMD's alternative to Nvidia's AI-assisted "DLSS" upscaling tech. Though not always the better of the two options, FSR has nonetheless proven competitive with DLSS across many games and scenarios. Our own Tim and Steve published a fantastic comparison video on the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel, so be sure to take a look at that if you want a more in-depth breakdown of where the technologies succeed and fail.

Speaking of DLSS, why hasn't Quake II RTX received support for that tech yet? After all, the entire project has been heavily promoted by Nvidia. Surely it would make sense for Lightspeed to implement the feature for RTX GPU owners?

According to developer AlexP on Quake II RTX's Steam Community discussions, it's not that simple. Quake uses the General Public License, which allows users to tweak, change, and distribute the game and its code at will; so long as derivative projects abide by those same rules. Since DLSS is closed-off proprietary technology and FSR is open-source, it's easy to see where the conflict lies here.

Regardless, FSR is more accessible to a wider range of PC gamers, anyway, so we're happy to see it find its way to Quake II RTX.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/93124-quake-ii-rtx-receives-support-hdr-amd-fsr.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

I wish it would receive more fps.

 

[bviktor]

I mean, yeah, nice, but if you have trouble running a 25 years old game with such low polygon count and ridiculous triangle heads, you're doing it wrong.

 

[RudyBob]

It's nice what they continue to do to this game. In the end though it is still Quake 2 and I for one have played enough, though I occasionally pop in for 10 minutes when I simply don't know what to do

 

[phenomx8]

Yeah, this is awesome... Have been using magpie with this game together with RTX on my 1060 6 GB and its quite acceptable to play @1080p30 , somtimes dips at 20fps. But I get Quake II RTX with my copy from my bethesda account and not steam, is there any download link with the patch ??

 

[theruck]

It looks as ugly as the original release

 

[nodfor]

I mean, yeah, nice, but if you have trouble running a 25 years old game with such low polygon count and ridiculous triangle heads, you're doing it wrong.

The game is fully rendered with RTX tech, hence the heavy workload for the gpu

 

[maroon1]

Saying that FSR competes with DLSS is misleading

I'm playing God of War, which is the 1st game I played that support FSR and DLSS. I can tell you that FSR no match for DLSS

I'm playing on 1080p display (gaming laptop), I can see that DLSS (even balanced mode) look noticeable better than FSR ultra quality mode. There is blurriness on FSR on that I don't see when using DLSS. Not to mention that DLSS also has less aliasing. The difference clear to me.

Also, FSR performance mode look much worse than DLSS ultra performance which also surprised me because DLSS ultra performance mode upscale from very low resolution (360p). I don't recommend using any of these mode because all are blurry but performance mode on FSR just look unbelievably bad (at least when playing on 1080p display). On DLSS, I have to say that there is big difference between ultra performance mode and performance mode. Performance mode look much closer to quality mode than ultra performance.

FSR look a little blurry on ultra quality (you can easily tell that is not running on native or DLSS higher modes) but starts to look very soft and blury when using balanced mode and performance.

 

[Kosmoz]

The game is fully rendered with RTX tech, hence the heavy workload for the gpu

As far as I know it's actually the first game to have real time Path-Tracing.

LINK > https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/real-time-path-tracing-and-denoising-in-quake-ii-rtx/

That's why is so intensive on the GPU.

 

[envirovore]

As far as I know it's actually the first game to have real time Path-Tracing.

LINK > https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/real-time-path-tracing-and-denoising-in-quake-ii-rtx/

That's why is so intensive on the GPU.

Correct, first game to use real time path tracing.

 

[loki1944]

I much prefer OG Quake II look; this version looks like vaseline got wiped on everything.

 

[Sausagemeat]

I have yet to use FSR and I’m using an RX480 to play modern games so I should be using it. Sure it bumps the frame rate but it ruins the image quality and seems to add this strange jitter and shimmer to the image. Maybe it will improve but right now it’s useless.

 

[Shadowboxer]

Saying that FSR competes with DLSS is misleading

I'm playing God of War, which is the 1st game I played that support FSR and DLSS. I can tell you that FSR no match for DLSS

I'm playing on 1080p display (gaming laptop), I can see that DLSS (even balanced mode) look noticeable better than FSR ultra quality mode. There is blurriness on FSR on that I don't see when using DLSS. Not to mention that DLSS also has less aliasing. The difference clear to me.

Also, FSR performance mode look much worse than DLSS ultra performance which also surprised me because DLSS ultra performance mode upscale from very low resolution (360p). I don't recommend using any of these mode because all are blurry but performance mode on FSR just look unbelievably bad (at least when playing on 1080p display). On DLSS, I have to say that there is big difference between ultra performance mode and performance mode. Performance mode look much closer to quality mode than ultra performance.

FSR look a little blurry on ultra quality (you can easily tell that is not running on native or DLSS higher modes) but starts to look very soft and blury when using balanced mode and performance.

Yup im playing through God of War at the moment and the difference between FSR and DLSS is enormous. FSR is so much worse. The main difference is in motion, DLSS seems to make the image much clearer. FSR seems to make the image blurry and shaky. Screenshots dont really show this, you need to play the game. I think a lot of it has to do with the AA that DLSS incorporates, it seems way better than TAA.

I have yet to find an FSR implementation thats as good as just a normal resolution scaler let alone as good as DLSS. I wish this was covered more. The Tech press loved hating on DLSS when it was bad but seem to want to leave FSR alone despite it being much worse.

 

[ZedRM]

I love how they're taking this game to the next level, again and again. I wish they would do this with Quake 1.