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Completely Path-Traced Version of Quake 2 Using RTX Created


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For those of you with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, there is now another game that takes advantage of the GPU's RT Cores, it just might look a little old. Q2VKPT is a proof-of-concept project that has completely replaced the original graphics code of Quake II with a path tracing solution called VKPT. Rasterization is only used for rendering the UI, so everything else uses ray tracing and path tracing. Path tracing and ray tracing are different, as the FAQ at the first link explains, as ray tracing is a primitive operation that does not produce realistic images, while path tracing is the light transport algorithm here that does create the image.

To make this possible, a number of technologies are being used, including the RT cores of NVIDIA's Turing-based GPUs, which are being accessed with the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. As you may have guessed by that extension name, this is using the Vulkan API instead of DirectX, and so can be run on Linux as well as Windows, provided you have an RTX graphics card. In addition to utilizing the RT cores, an adaptive temporal filter is also in place, which will track changes to the light transport path so previously computed information can be reused, instead of new computations being done. Many modern games use temporal filtering in a similar way, but look only to the image space instead of the high-dimensional space used here.

Even if you do not have an RTX graphics card, you may still want to check out the source links as this proof-of-concept could be demonstrating some of what we will see in the future of games. If you do have an RTX card though, you can also download and try he game out for yourself.

 

 

Source: Q2VKPT (images source) and Github Repository



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For those of you with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, there is now another game that takes advantage of the GPU's RT Cores, it just might look a little old. Q2VKPT is a proof-of-concept project that has completely replaced the original graphics code of Quake II with a path tracing solution called VKPT. Rasterization is only used for rendering the UI, so everything else uses ray tracing and path tracing. Path tracing and ray tracing are different, as the FAQ at the first link explains, as ray tracing is a primitive operation that does not produce realistic images, while path tracing is the light transport algorithm here that does create the image.

To make this possible, a number of technologies are being used, including the RT cores of NVIDIA's Turing-based GPUs, which are being accessed with the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. As you may have guessed by that extension name, this is using the Vulkan API instead of DirectX, and so can be run on Linux as well as Windows, provided you have an RTX graphics card. In addition to utilizing the RT cores, an adaptive temporal filter is also in place, which will track changes to the light transport path so previously computed information can be reused, instead of new computations being done. Many modern games use temporal filtering in a similar way, but look only to the image space instead of the high-dimensional space used here.

Even if you do not have an RTX graphics card, you may still want to check out the source links as this proof-of-concept could be demonstrating some of what we will see in the future of games. If you do have an RTX card though, you can also download and try he game out for yourself.

 

 

Source: Q2VKPT (images source) and Github Repository

 

news42240_1-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_2-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_3-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_4-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_5-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_6-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_7-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_8-completely_pathtraced_versionews42240_9-completely_pathtraced_versio

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Can we have Unreal Tournament please? :D

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I played it, it's been so long since I played the original I need to do some back to back runs to see if I notice any difference.

Since the project is up on GitHub, it would be interesting if someone went in and returned the original graphics code with a switch to go between them. I'd also be interested in seeing the denoiser disabled, because that plays a huge role currently in this accelerated ray tracing setup. The ray tracing accelerated by RT cores is in no way enough to provide the number of rays to produce an accurate image without a denoiser, which one of the images at the source showed, as it had a slider to go between the denoiser being off and on.

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