Experience realistic reflections, refraction, shadows, and global illumination while you fight your way through the hostile Strogg civilization in the first three levels of the original game. Only then will the fate of humanity be known. Quake II with RTX---It's On. This demo includes the first three single-player levels of the PC gaming classic. Owners of the original can patch their copy and enjoy the entire game, including multiplayer modes fully path traced.

Quake II RTX with GeForce RTX

Check out Quake II RTX and how it applies an advanced form of ray tracing known as path tracing. Get ready to experience 1997's Quake II like never before. This is possible thanks to Nvidia's VKRay, an extension that allows developers using the Vulkan API to add ray-traced effects to their games.

Real-Time Ray Tracing

Global lighting effects like realistic reflections, refraction, shadows, and global illumination create a whole new Quake II experience. Quake II RTX includes real-time range time of day lighting, sun light and indirect illumination. Water and glass will refract light, surfaces will deliver more accurate reflections and light sources illuminate surrounding objects. These effects Nvidia says will require the RT cores found on RTX series GPUs, thus the minimum specification for running the game will be a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU.

What's New

Fixed Issues:

  • Fixed a crash in the game logic when a monster interacts with a door in notarget mode (#92)
  • Fixed a crash when the map file doesn't have a VIS hunk (#223)
  • Fixed some Vulkan validation layer issues (#229, #246, more)
  • Fixed texture alignment issues on some doors (#211)
  • Fixed the flare gun still using ammo with dmflags including 8192 (DF_INFINITE_AMMO) (https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/)191)
  • Fixed Vulkan queue initialization on platforms that don't support split queues (#248)
  • Switched the OpenAL dependency with a statically linked library (#224)

Misc Improvements:

  • Added support for building on PowerPC 64 LE CPU architecture (#260)
  • Adjusted the automatic UI scaling to avoid making the UI too big
  • Improved precision of target frame rate adjustment (#242)
  • Tuned the full-screen blend effects to be less intensive
  • Updated the Loading plaque texture (#265)

Contributions by GitHub user @res2k:

  • Added a warning when screen-space image memory usage is very high (#179)
  • Added control over fallback radiance of emissive materials (#210)
  • Added menu controls for the full screen blend effects (#216)
  • Added support for spotlights with an emission profile and a player flashlight (#203, #214)
  • Fixed a crash when some textures are missing (#263)
  • Fixed an overflow condition when pt_bsp_sky_lights is more than 1 (#262)
  • Fixed animated textures on BSP models (#187)
  • Fixed crashes when renderer initialization fails (#199)
  • Fixed FSR image scaling in some cases (#232)
  • Fixed incorrect scaling of textures without a custom material definition (#235)
  • Fixed mode setting on Linux in GitGub CI builds (#268)
  • Fixed save game compatibility with Q2RTX 1.5.0 (#193)
  • Fixed some issues with lighting in custom maps (#189)
  • Fixed texture data size computation for R16_UNORM textures (#236)
  • Fixed the HDR screenshot feature (#190)
  • Fixed the look of smoke effects (#195)
  • Fixed the range of animated light intensities (#200)
  • Fixed the replacement textures when multiple materials are used with the same base texture (#222)
  • Improved light list handling to fix excessive flicker and noise (#234)
  • Improved material system robustness for games with custom textures (#201)
  • Improved polygonal light sampling to reduce noise and darkening (#266)
  • Improved Wayland support (#261, #221)
  • Integrated several fixes from Q2PRO (#196)
  • Replaced the single sky_clusters.txt file with per-map files (#219)
  • Tweaked particles to have more nuanced colors (#197)
  • Updated SDL2 to 2.26.1 (#252)