Our Quake II RTX ray-traced remaster of Quake II was the talk of the town at GDC, wowing gamers new and old with its top-to-bottom enhancements that improve virtually every aspect of the 1997 classic.

Now, we can confirm that Quake II RTX will be released on June 6th, 2019. If you have a GeForce RTX graphics card, or other capable hardware, you can experience the first 3 levels of the game for free, fully remastered with path-traced graphics and a variety of other enhancements. And if you own a copy of Quake II, you can play the campaign in its entirety, and play against others in online multiplayer.

Furthermore, the source code will be posted to GitHub, enabling others to expand on our work with further advancements and enhancements, or to use the code to ray trace Quake II mods and total conversions.

The June 6th release will also look even better thanks to numerous improvements to image quality, and new additions that add even more path-traced enhancements. Highlights include:

Improved Global Illumination rendering, with three selectable quality presets, including two-bounce GI

Multiplayer support

Time of day options that radically change the appearance of some levels

New weapon models & textures

New dynamic environments (Stroggos surface, and space)

Better physically based atmospheric scattering, including settings for Stroggos sky

Real-time reflectivity of the player and weapon model on water and glass surfaces, and player model shadows, for owners of the complete game (the original Shareware release does not include player models)

Improved ray tracing denoising technology

All 3,000+ original game textures have been updated with a mix of Q2XP mod-pack textures and our own enhancements

Updated effects with new sprites and particle animations

Dynamic lighting for items such as blinking lights, signs, switches, elevators and moving objects

Caustics approximation to improve water lighting effects

High-quality screenshot mode that makes your screenshots look even better

Support for the old OpenGL renderer, enabling you to switch between RTX ON and RTX OFF

Cylindrical projection mode for wide-angle field of view on widescreen displays

To see many of these enhancements in action, check out our new Quake II RTX trailer: