Quake 2 RTX Upgraded: v1.2 Adds New Ray Tracing Features, Dynamic Res + More! - Subtítulos bilingües
The Quake RTX for Mastering has been one of my favorite releases.
of this year,
taking a game from 1997 that I know and love and bringing it into a hyper state of the art ray traced 2019.
Since that June release,
the game has been updated multiple times with version 1.2 dropping on the 26th of November with accompanying drivers on this 27.
This new version promises improved visuals and customization.
So what kind of updates are we seeing here?
Let's rocket jump on in to find out.
Most of biggest updates with 1.2 fall within the round.
of modifications to the rendering and art assets.
One the first things that's pretty easy to notice is the general change to much of the texture work.
While the original release used physically based variants of Quake 2 XP textures,
they were not all probably updated with the same amount of love for time reasons I assume.
So, version 1.2 reworks a lot of the textures to show metallic properties more often.
This is then combined with improvements in 1.2 to the way path tracing can represent metals and reflections,
and leaves many scenes looking rather different, utilizing same time of day settings and resolution across version 1.
1.1 and 1.2, these differences can look still rather stark.
Like here you can see how this wall surface now has a proper metallic sheen to it that
really emphasizes the normal map across its surface.
In comparison, version 1.1 looks rather matte, so the texture looks like grey stone rather than metal.
Or how about the shotgun shell casings in the ammo box here?
In 1.2, they have colored metals on the jacket, with pixel accurate reflections of their surrounding.
1.1 on the other hand in that same scene shows more matte materials that in general all look very similar,
where there's little differentiation in materials between the box and the shells that are in the box.
Even that oft-used vent texture now looks like thin sheet metal, whereas before it looked rather matte and almost stone-like in comparison.
Alongside metals, glazed materials such as certain screens in the game now support picture and picture security camera feed footage.
Here in the previous versions, there was merely a static texture there.
By the way, does this static texture from 1.1 look familiar to you?
Or is it just me?
Boy, I sure do miss Rhino Squad.
But back to the topic of hand,
those picture-in-picture feeds have full-scene representations that even look to have global lighting applied to them.
And of course, like any scene element, they can be represented in reflections as well.
Alongside these textures and material changes, I did notice a slight change to the way some polygon lights emit their light.
Having a redder and more contrasty hue, reminiscent of the OpenGL version of the game, I say.
In total,
these updates to the textures and how specular materials can now be better represented with the refinements to the path tracing has transformed many of the scenes in the game,
especially in those scenes where there's a lot of metal present.
Like here in the character armor, which looks rather different in 1.2, less like stone and more like metal?
The rework textures also had more material diversity.
where otherwise in the previous version, many textures looked extremely similar with how the way light affects them.
An thing to note is how the greater diversity in materials and less extremely diffused materials means some scenes now have less bounce lighting,
since the materials in the scene are now generally less matte.
That's pretty neat.
Another big change occurs with how glass rendering is done.
Glass has made to be more physically accurate in a couple of ways.
Along glass textures being updated to be higher resolution I presume and not showing those pixel artifacts on the surface normal.
the reflections on that glass are now more stable and clean.
Here you can see how the reflection version 1.1 has a slight dithering on the edges of lines,
while 1.2 cleans it up rather nicely.
On top of those improvements,
there's also the option to enable glass thickness,
which adds in a layer of refraction and reflection for the opposite side of the pane of glass.
With this you can see how the glass itself is not just an infinitely thin reflecting plane,
changing the look of material seen through it,
but rather it is something now in 1.2 with its own volume, where light has to enter it and then leave it.
A very cool update, but suitably experimental in my view from some viewing angles.
Like here from this viewing angle,
you can see how the lower ray count at 1080p causes pixel swimming on the inner surface of the glass.
If you compare it to the reference image of how it would look like with many more rays per pixel,
you can see how it should actually look, so close but not the same.
Nonetheless, it's a cool addition for a lot of angles and definitely pretty great for screenshots.
So changes to reflections in glass, but also perfect mirrors are now added into the game, with support for multiple recursive reflections.
So, in such perfect mirrors that are perfect,
flat with little to no material differentiation on their surface,
you can see your reflection and the reflection of your reflection and so on and so forth,
but not going into infinity, as that's wasted performance for many practical views.
So the game offers 8 levels of refraction and reflection for such surfaces with the max set in the options menu.
The upgrade to Glass is really only visible in a few rare scenes in the game where Glass materials have a color to them.
In 1.2, Light enters Glass.
It projects onto the plane of Glass and lights up its inner surface, and then it transmits through to the other side.
now tinted and darkened by the glass having been traveled through.
In version 1.1,
the light does not really affect the surface of the glass itself, nor does it cast through it to show off that it has volume.
And when you check out the other side of the glass, the color of the sunlight remains the same instead of tinting blue.
and darkening as it really would.
Beyond the glass, another highly reflective surface also saw rendering improvements.
And that would be water.
In addition to the caustic light that water also had present in version 1.1,
now you can go underwater and the water itself has a level of thickness to it as it absorbs light.
Here we go.
in version 1.1, you can see how going underwater shows perfect visibility no matter how far you look into the distance.
It likewise also has a kind of discontinuous look to those areas where water meets other surfaces,
and it does not show variation in its visuals based upon its depth.
Version 1.2 on their other hand with its water fog shows a greater appearance of depth in the water as it absorbs light.
Along with being lit,
water can also show off deep volumetric shadows,
kind of like how the color glass looks,
where you can see moody differences of lighting in the water volume depending upon where shadows lie above it or within it.
This includes everyone's gravity.
graphic demo favorite of volume metric lighting, something wholly missing from version 1.1.
Speaking of fog,
all the volumetric lighting in the air now can also be represented in reflections,
so dense air being lit by the sun here underneath the fan is now also showing up in the reflection on the water as it should in version 1.2.
Volumetric lighting is missing from reflections in version 1.1.
The last little bits they added to the game was a changing of the default level of detail bias for TV.
textures.
So textures further into the distance now use a resolution version of themselves.
And then there's another clever little tweak on top of this.
If you notice in this video,
the version 1.2 side of the screen always looked a tiny bit sharper,
even at the same 1080p resolution and when the content was the exact same.
That is because I am outputting at 4k here, but utilizing an internal rendering resolution and scale of 1080p.
In 1.1, 50% resolution scales like this have linear upscaling, so it softens those pixels up a bit.
In version 1.2,
50% resolution scales switch from linear to integer scaling, perfectly mapping 1 1080p pixel to a 2x2 box in a 4k pixel grid.
All other percentages of res scaling still use linear scaling of course, but darn, what a neat feature.
I wish more game developers did that for their in-game scaling.
One of the biggest advances version 1 has over the release version,
was actually introduced in version 1.1, and that would be the adding of the game's soundtrack.
In the original release, there was no music, and you only heard the ambient and fully audio of the game, like gunshots and such.
The new release has those sweet, overlaid, and 90's tunes that you know so well, though you're old.
Quake II CD will sadly not work with this update and instead you're provided .OGG versions in the game directory.
Although I should note that I did encounter an audio bug on the Prison 1 or Jail 1 level that was confirmed by my colleague John Liniman.
I'm not sure what it is here but the audio on this level gets a metallic.
sound to it, and it cuts off abruptly rather often.
Here, have a listen.
So hopefully that can be fixed up at some point.
With all these changes to assets and the new music and the rendering features,
you and generally now have a game that has greater material variety, looks sharper, and has punchier contrast and punchier audio.
Areas that lack material and lighting contrast and looked a bit matte now look rather different.
And they look different in a way that I rather like.
But does the game perform the same?
Beyond the audio visual upgrades,
Version 1.2 also adds in some new options,
like the ability to turn off the Temporal AA pass,
leading to some extremely raw edges, and the noisier look to the game for those who like that.
kind of thing.
But in my opinion, the greatest option added now is the ability to utilize dynamic resolution scaling.
With you being able to set a target FPS independent of the refresh rate,
you can also control how low and how high the resolution can go up to your chosen output resolution.
It in general seems to work exactly like the controls make it seem like it would, but it's not ultra aggressive necessarily.
For example,
here I started the game at 4k max settings on an ASUS ROG Strix RTX 2080 Ti,
which is much too high settings and resolution to get 60 FPS,
and it took a little more than five seconds to drop from an initial 10 FPS.
at 4K to 60 FPS with the GPU being fully maxed out at 2304 by 1296.
So it downscales the resolution, but not necessarily super quickly.
Testing out the difference on the mid-range GPU with the RTX 2060 Super, I could see how even targeting a resolution of 1440.
P60 managed to perform better than just straight 1080p with no DRS on.
The DRS managed to keep the frame rate even as the screen was changing rapidly.
Here, I also tried out a more aggressive FPS target of 70 FPS, leaving the GPU underutilized, but I did not notice a dramatic change.
change in performance, but perhaps it could help in some scenarios.
Still targeting a resolution higher than the performance can manage like 1440p here will cause a temporary low FPS when you load up a map,
or when you would switch from an extremely uncomplexed scene rapidly to a much more complex one.
So those are things to consider when utilizing max resolution.
and FPS targeting with DRS, but I definitely recommend DRS here.
That new dynamic resolution feature should be utilized to max your frame rates and resolution while turning on the new graphical settings.
And of all of them,
I could only find one that is toggleable and has a noticeable impact on performance, and that would be the amount recursive reflections and refractions.
Here I would recommend a value of 2 over 8 as it has comparable the visuals to 8 in most scenes while not being overly blurry,
ghosting or creating artifacts.
It also runs around 7% better on average.
I do not recommend turning off recursive reflections and refractions.
In spite of the game running 20%
better with it set to off,
because then the rays and many reflections are going to be sampling what looks like gray textures,
making the denoise or having a harder time to fill in the dots,
and it leaves ghosting and an unfocused look in a lot of reflections.
Utilizing the closest settings that I can manage between versions of medium global illumination and two reflection bounces,
it would appear that the improvements to the denoising materials and all that make the game a bit heavier.
Here at 1440p you can see the RTX 2060 Super, managing to perform 10% slower in version 1.2 vs.
version 1.1, so the upgrade to visuals has a cost to performance.
Looking the RTX 2070 Super,
we see an extremely similar difference in terms of percentage version over version,
but the card in general fares much better at 1440p at these settings.
So the game is a bit heavier,
but you have a generally better looking game, with more options to mitigate it being heavier when you consider that addition of DRS.
All this is a great update to the game, but it makes me wonder about the future.
What?
Other games will light-speed studios from Nvidia be tackling next.
How much of the work done for this remaster can be applied to other games?
Like a Half-Life game with Pat Tracing or Ray Tracing?
No, your eyes are not fooling you.
These are indeed Half-Life assets being Pat Traced in Vulcan with hardware acceleration.
There is a catch that...
though.
This is Half-Life textures and models,
and presumably some gameplay code ported it over to Quake 2 RTX by the developer Vector,
who released this teaser showing it off not too long ago.
I'm not sure what the future for that project entails,
since they never got back to me, but hey, perhaps we can get something like Half-Life Path Traced at some point.
some point, officially or unofficially through mods.
Until that next ray tracer master comes out, I hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did enjoy it, please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel.
If you are already a subscriber, then consider hitting that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as Digital releases a video.
As you want to talk to me about to RTX or volumetric light chefs in front of a spinning fan,
write a comment below or follow me and Digital Foundry on Twitter.
And as always, this is Alex, bidding you farewell, und auf wiedersehen!
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