Quake II RTX update adds new textures, improved rendering and more

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: Nvidia partnered with Bethesda earlier this year to launch a ray-traced version of Quake II. It wasn’t just a one-and-done, however, as the GPU maker on Tuesday rolled out an update for the remaster that further improves eye candy.

Quake II RTX v1.2 adds more than 400 enhanced textures to the mix and there are now real-time ray-traced graphics that can be seen on security monitors and other displays. Select surfaces now exhibit recursive reflections (reflections reflected in other reflections) and materials like metal, water and glass have also been enhanced for improved quality.

For example, tinted glass now impacts how light passes through it. There’s even a new thick glass setting that affects glass rendering.

Speaking of settings, Nvidia has added multiple options and toggles to further fine-tune the graphical experience. Reflection and refraction depth let you control the number of allowed reflection or refraction bounces while temporal anti-aliasing gives you control over Nvidia’s post-process anti-aliasing. A new resolution scaling option, meanwhile, lets the game automatically adjust the internal rendering resolution to try and maintain a target frame rate.

For those running Quake II RTX on Steam, the new update should automatically install itself. Those with a standalone copy can grab the latest version as a free download.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/82934-quake-ii-rtx-update-adds-new-textures-improved.html

 

[magdziam]

Great game but a 20yo game.... How dare you.

 

[IAMTHESTIG]

Quake was a freaking awesome game though... now if they would make a proper VR conversion too then I would be in heaven. I've been enjoying the VR mod for Quake 2 but there are some quirky limitations. Since Bethesda already has VR converted games I think old Quake fans would enjoy a solid VR version with all these graphical enhancements.

For those interested in VR on old games there is also a VR mod for Doom 3, which actually works quite well once tuned. I've played the entire game through in VR and it was amazing fun - and scary as shiznit! I usually go "meh" to jump scares in games like this but when you have 3D depth perception and have a monster that actually looks bigger then you rush you, it certainly gets the blood pumping.

 

[Markoni35]

It does look a lot better than the original, but if they increased the texture resolution even more (about twice more the current size) it would really look 2019-grade. Although it looks pretty good anyway, because of reflections, ambient lighting and all the other RT goodies. Tempting... tempting... very tempting...