- Aug 14, 2000
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I just completed Quake 2 RTX on hard difficulty. Using a 2070 I had to use 70% render scale and low GI to maintain locked 60FPS @ 1440p. Obviously the performance hit is colossal, and anyone just testing the starting level doesn't know what they're doing as later levels are more demanding.
Subjectively lighting & shadowing showed incremental improvement compared to the best rasterizers I’ve seen, but nowhere near "rasterization is totally obsolete and I can never go back". This is a full path-traced game so the usual "it's just a bit of ray tracing bolted onto rasterization" doesn't apply here. The upscaled anti-aliasing produces perfect image quality without any jaggies, though I did find rare cases where the denoising failed and produced black specks, usually dynamic lights from weapons combining with sunlight streaming through fans.
What I found annoying were the "double reflections". The best way to describe it is that the water surface reflects from above and below, at the same time. You can't judge the depth of shallow water from above anymore, and you can't tell how close you are to the surface from below, because in the latter you see your gun twice. The example screenshot shows a circular tunnel viewed underwater looking like a figure '8', not like a cylinder. With additional reflected texture lights in some scenes, the whole thing becomes extremely disorientating and doesn't look realistic at all.
The HD textures make a big difference on their own without ray tracing, and they were changed to work better with RTX, so it's definitely not a case of "oh, just flip a switch and it automatically works properly everywhere". Also some of the weapon models look awful.
This was an interesting exercise but I wouldn’t play this version again. There are other HD versions that look better overall as a total package (e.g. self-shadowing parallax, advanced decals and particle effects, etc) that run vastly faster. But truth be told, for this game I prefer retro graphics with a sensible source port giving more accurate rendering without major visual changes.
TLDR: slightly better lighting/shadowing than the best rasterizers, badly overdone reflections in water, all at a colossal performance hit.
Subjectively lighting & shadowing showed incremental improvement compared to the best rasterizers I’ve seen, but nowhere near "rasterization is totally obsolete and I can never go back". This is a full path-traced game so the usual "it's just a bit of ray tracing bolted onto rasterization" doesn't apply here. The upscaled anti-aliasing produces perfect image quality without any jaggies, though I did find rare cases where the denoising failed and produced black specks, usually dynamic lights from weapons combining with sunlight streaming through fans.
What I found annoying were the "double reflections". The best way to describe it is that the water surface reflects from above and below, at the same time. You can't judge the depth of shallow water from above anymore, and you can't tell how close you are to the surface from below, because in the latter you see your gun twice. The example screenshot shows a circular tunnel viewed underwater looking like a figure '8', not like a cylinder. With additional reflected texture lights in some scenes, the whole thing becomes extremely disorientating and doesn't look realistic at all.
The HD textures make a big difference on their own without ray tracing, and they were changed to work better with RTX, so it's definitely not a case of "oh, just flip a switch and it automatically works properly everywhere". Also some of the weapon models look awful.
This was an interesting exercise but I wouldn’t play this version again. There are other HD versions that look better overall as a total package (e.g. self-shadowing parallax, advanced decals and particle effects, etc) that run vastly faster. But truth be told, for this game I prefer retro graphics with a sensible source port giving more accurate rendering without major visual changes.
TLDR: slightly better lighting/shadowing than the best rasterizers, badly overdone reflections in water, all at a colossal performance hit.
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