The big picture: Thanks to Nvidia's support and the growing commercial appeal of retro releases, classic gaming franchises are experiencing an unprecedented modding renaissance. Realistic lighting effects are among the most popular enhancements, although they typically require some development expertise and a capable GPU to implement effectively.
Developer Brian Schulman's latest project, Duke-RT, introduces a major change in how Duke Nukem 3D graphics are rendered. The open-source code adds a new ray-tracing rendering backend to Raze, a fork of the original Build engine that incorporates technology from GZDoom prior to its development split over AI-generated code concerns.
Schulman has been active in game development for more than 15 years, working with applied machine learning techniques, various shader languages, and other AI-related technologies. He also maintains a retro-inspired personal website, where he notes that he drew inspiration from GZDoom-RT when developing his own path-traced renderer for the Build engine.
Duke-RT builds on the foundations of the Raze fork, adding computationally intensive modern rendering techniques such as path tracing, ray tracing, advanced lighting, and custom material authoring. The project also supports denoising, upscaling, and frame generation through Nvidia's DLSS libraries, meaning it currently targets Windows systems despite implementing support for both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API.
The initial Duke-RT version was released just a few days ago. The code includes a core renderer with support for ray tracing and path-tracing lighting, HDR rendering, DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction, and more.
Duke-RT currently requires Windows 10 or later, as well as the Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour to make "those alien bastards pay for shooting up your ride."
Schulman retouched the first episode of Duke Nukem 3D to add new lighting and effects, while Episodes 2 and 3 still retain their original graphics. Duke-RT is a work in progress, meaning users should expect some issues related to both graphics and gameplay stability. The developer is now looking to add additional features, including new material and lighting passes for Episodes 2 and 3, volumetric effects, auto-exposure, and more.
A few hours ago, Schulman also released a small bugfix update to address a crashing issue many users were experiencing in the original release. Raze combines the engines of Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Redneck Rampage, and other Build engine games into a single package, but compatibility is not guaranteed. The new path-tracing renderer is expected to work only with the original FPS game featuring the talkative, strip-club-loving action hero developed by Apogee Software.