“We first heard of Christoph’s Q2VKPT [Quake II mod] sometime in late January shortly after it was released,” Principal DevTech Engineer Alexey Panteleev and lead programmer on Quake II RTX tells me. “We were not aware of the project before that. Originally, our intention was just to analyse and improve performance and fix some image quality issues. I started making some improvements, then everyone got excited, and then things really started cooking.”



“Quake II was already a pioneer in simulating many lighting effects,” NVIDIA’s Manuel Kraemer adds. “For instance, the first Quake is credited as the first game to store pre-computed diffuse lighting and occlusions into lightmaps. Because these ray-tracing calculations could not be performed in real time, much of the lighting in the game was static. Many shadows were also missing or incorrect. Although lightmaps have been greatly improved since, they remain a fundamental technique that is still used today in almost every game.”

With NVIDIA's Alexey Panteleev and lead programmer on Quake II RTX telling us, "Our goal is to publish an open source version of Quake II RTX." The news came as part of our recent chat with a few of the engineers at NVIDIA who put together the demo that was showcased at GDC this year.Quake II RTX, as it's being called, replaces all lighting effects in-game with real-time ray-tracing in a truly stunning look at one PC gaming's all-time classics from 1997.No release date has been set, so stay tuned on that front. For more, be sure to check out our feature - NVIDIA On Turning Quake II into the First Fully Ray-Traced Game