When Nvidia confirmed off their ray traced Quake II demo at first of the 12 months, everybody (together with our personal Alec, RPS in peace) went a bit nuts for it. Despite being a heck of lots older than all the opposite shiny RTX games on present, it was Quake II that actually made individuals sit up and take note of what Nvidia’s new fancy pants reflection tech might actually deliver to the desk. And now, Nvidia are releasing a full model of Quake II RTX on June 6 from GeForce.com, with the primary three ranges out there for completely nothing – identical to they had been again within the good outdated shareware days.
You’ll must personal the complete game to play the whole factor with RTX results (plus, after all, an Nvidia RTX graphics card or a suitable GTX card ranging from the 6GB GTX 1060 upwards), however as you’ll be able to see within the trailer beneath, it positive does look a heck of lots prettier than it did in 1997.
Fully-remastered with a ray tracing method referred to as path-tracing, Quake II RTX not solely has extra life like lighting results, together with a real-time day and night time cycle, however it additionally comes with new sprites, new weapon fashions and textures, in addition to up to date particle animations to call only a few of its many enhancements.
Alas, Quake II RTX gained’t be suitable with any of the game’s growth packs come June 6, however Nvidia have mentioned they will be posting Quake II RTX’s supply code to GitHub, so chances are you’ll properly discover keen followers selecting up the slack ahead of you understand it. The identical goes for mods and whole conversions, too. They gained’t be supported at launch, however it’s in all probability solely a matter of time earlier than you’ll be capable to play them in all their RTX glory.
How do I get Quake II RTX?
If you don’t already personal Quake II, you’ll be capable to obtain the primary three ranges with all the brand new RTX options totally free from Nvidia’s web site on June 6.
If you do personal Quake II, you’ll nonetheless must obtain and set up Quake II RTX from Nvidia, however there will even be a degree within the set up course of the place you’ll be able to level it in direction of the placement of the complete game in your PC. This will permit the installer to repeat over all the degrees and belongings into Quake II RTX, so whenever you boot up Quake II RTX, you’ll be capable to play the whole marketing campaign plus multiplayer matches in full RTX mode.
As for Quake II RTX’s PC necessities, Nvidia recommends the next specs:
Minimum PC necessities:
OS: Windows 7
CPU: Intel Core i3-3220 / AMD equal
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or greater
Storage: 2GB
Personally, I’m shocked they’re recommending an RTX 2060 because the naked minimal graphics card for Quake II RTX, however in response to Nvidia, the game’s path tracing methods are fairly performance-intensive. In reality, they are saying Quake II RTX has “the highest workloads of any ray traced game released to date”, because of the reality it’s utilizing path tracing for rendering virtually all the pieces you see onscreen.
That doesn’t bode properly for any GTX ray tracing, admittedly, however relaxation assured that I’ll be testing as many graphics playing cards as I can post-release to see what’s actually doable on GTX and RTX playing cards alike.
