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Path-traced Quake II RTX landing on June 6

This recreates the classic shooter using path-tracing technology, providing a total visual upgrade with realistic lighting effects.

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Nvidia is taking the classic shooter Quake II and making an RTX version of it, and if you're eager to get your hands on this remake then there's good news, as it'll be landing on June 6 as the world's first fully path-traced game.

Path-tracing is a ray-tracing technique that unifies effects like shadows, reflections, refractions, and more into one algorithm, and we've already seen path-tracing in action with Minecraft earlier this year.

Quake II RTX, as it's known, includes the first three single-player levels of the game, with those who own Quake II able to experience the whole game with path-tracing, including co-op and multiplayer deathmatch.

"Quake II RTX is an expression of our love and passion for PC gaming," said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at Nvidia. "By applying next-generation ray-traced graphics technologies and using the Vulkan API, we are able to share this PC classic with a new generation of gamers who can download and play it for free."

"It's rare that a PC game has the impact and longevity of Quake II, and seeing it reimagined with ray tracing 20 years later is something special for me," added Tim Willits, studio director of id Software and someone who helped to create Quake originally. "Equally special is the relationship with Nvidia, whom we have worked with since the early days of first-person shooters. Seeing how Nvidia integrated modern features into this classic game is really exciting."

The lighting effects, however, are pretty advanced, so require hardware like the Turing architecture and GeForce RTX GPUs. In fact, the minimum specification for running the game is a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU. Nvidia VKRay is also used here, an extension that allows all developers using Vulkan API to add ray-tracing effects to their game.

To see how it looks, check out the trailer right here. Is Quake II a favourite of yours?

Quake II

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