The different week, I obtained my y-fronts in a bunch about how some intelligent fella had added raytracing to Quake II. A 22-year-old first-person shooter had successfully overwhelmed everybody else to the punch when it got here to the brand new, extra naturalistic type of game lighting presently solely obtainable on the latest Nvidia RTX playing cards. (You can do it a bit, kind of, in Battlefield V, however that’s it for now).
But I couldn’t play the bally factor, as I didn’t have an RTX graphics card. Now I do, for a bit, so I’ve been again to offer 1997’s previous Stroggs a 2019 paint job. Here’s a spot of evaluate and distinction, and fast ideas on whether or not or not it was value it.
I’ll begin with a video, as screenshots don’t actually promote how the brand new lighting system appears to be like in movement, as characters transfer round and shadows shift over them, as lights work like lights somewhat than brightly-coloured spots, as darkish corners are as black as that Dr Oetker pizza you left within the oven for 3 hours by mistake that one time.
It’s good, in brief. Not slap-me-round-the-face-and-call-me-Nigel startling, which is as a lot to do with it being Quake II, all the time the worst-looking of all of the id Quakes, beneath it as the rest, however there’s a ton of ambiance, notably as enemies burst from the gloom. I’m particularly struck, although, by the shadowing on the spinning gun at approx 16 seconds in. You didn’t get that on a Voodoo 2.
Here’s the earlier than and after, in case your thoughts is taking part in methods. OG Quake II on the left, ray-traced Quake II (within the Q2Pro shopper) on the best. Click for fullscreen.
The apparent factor to say it that, although the lighting’s all fancy, one thing of the unique, beyond-murky aesthetic is clearly misplaced. Because lights truly forged gentle, versus providing all of the illumination of a pound-shop keyring torch, the entire scene is way brighter and extra vibrant.
The flispside of that’s that when a scene has minimal gentle sources in it, the sense of depth and distant darkness is fairly dang superb:
Furthermore, explosions are an absolute delight, lighting up the entire place like no one’s enterprise. Here’s earlier than…
…and after:
Performance isn’t too dangerous. I’m working it on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 card at 1440p and 30 frames is extra frequent than 60 frames, but it surely’s greater than playable (much less so at 4K, for what it’s value). Even so, the thought of a 22-year-old game making a £700 graphics card pressure like this might be humorous if it wasn’t so disturbing.
The actual sting within the tail is that Christoph Schied’s path-traced Quake II mod relies on real-time noise-filtering to look pretty much as good because it does. Without that, you get a spotty mess, the consequence of 1000’s of various light-rays ‘painting’ the scene, as seen in earlier makes an attempt at this kind of factor here. Sometimes, that filtering blips out for a second, and so I’m irregularly seeing frames like this:
Only from time to time although, and solely when very shut to a different object. I can dwell with it, given how good the whole lot else appears to be like. Obviously, I’m eager to see this occur in prettier, more moderen games, although whether or not present {hardware} can actually sustain is a little bit of an open query till extra ray-traced stuff will get launched.
