Q2VKPT: Fully path traced Quake 2

That&#x27;s super interesting, like the detail is low, obviously but the realness of the lighting almost feels better than a lot of triple A games I&#x27;ve played lately in a way that makes <i>this</i> almost feel <i>more</i> real.

A couple of things that would be interesting to try with this. Artificially increasing the geometry with simple subdivision to give a measure of the impact of geometry on the scene.<p>Do a bloom post-processing filter to give the impression of brighter than maximum. I can see how this might not be considered the point because it&#x27;s not a ray-tracing solution, but it is a simple screen-space operation that&#x27;s independent of the technique used to generate the base image. Including such a filter can add a lot of visual appeal, particularly enhancing the lighting benefits of path tracing.

Huh, I wonder if applying that denoising filter to the OpenGL compute version <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raytracey.blogspot.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;real-time-path-traced-quake-2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raytracey.blogspot.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;real-time-path-traced...</a> is going to be as good

A very cool project, kudos to the developers. I don’t want to take anything away from it, but I did stop noticing the graphics pretty quickly and just started watching the gameplay. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of remembering the original overriding the cool-factor of ray tracing.

That reminds me of the <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.q3rt.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.q3rt.de&#x2F;</a> project. I wish someone tried to port that one to rtx.

Seeing Q2 bring back all sorts of memories. That was right about the time for me when I started seeing the benefits of dedicated graphics cards, and Q2 felt magical with one.

I guess if there&#x27;s ever a reason to replay Q2 single-player, that would be it.

I&#x27;d love a version of Half-Life (using the original engine) with this, that&#x27;s for sure.

It should probably be noted also that this doesn&#x27;t even seem to be using textures updated with normal &amp; specular maps. This is probably why all the surfaces appear a bit plasticky.

Those water reflections were oddly satisfying to see.

They might have wanted to build the demo on some game that has more realistic geometry and textures to showcase the benefits of raytracing. Quake 2 still looks 90&#x27;s mostly. I can spot the &quot;hard&quot; features in the demo myself to some extent but given well-known shading techniques you could get a close enough similar emulation of the effects that would fool most people.

&gt; Fully dynamic global illumination using path tracing, with raytraced shadows, glossy reflections and one bounce of indirect lighting.<p>I wonder how different two, three and four bounces of indirect lighting would make it look.<p>Would be super interesting to see a side-by-side comparison.

How hard would it be to implement varying resolution across the monitor with this approach, e.g. to combine with an eye-tracker to ensure that only the parts that the user looks at, are rendered in full resolution?

It feels like the effect could be improved by disabling most of the texture maps. The low resolution and baked-in lighting distracts from the physically correct surface shading.

To be honest, I&#x27;d really rather see this for Quake 1, which imho had better overall gameplay.

woa, the water reflects

Why, oh why not the first Quake?

core i9 x are coming awfully close to larrabee performance as demonstrated in 2008, we should be close to be doing this on the cpu unassisted

Very strange, I&#x27;m on a JetBlue flight and the website appears to be blacklisted on their in-flight WiFi (&quot;Fly-Fi&quot;)?