[ad_1]
These days, I have had the opportunity to return to the time when I was about eight years old and I felt the taste of the FPS. The game? Quake II with ray tracing.
Nvidia introduced this year a new technology on the market, as well as RTX video cards, which should give games a more beautiful appearance than ever before. I had two titles, Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which implemented ray tracing, but in different ways. Battlefield V is focused on rendering, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider further on the shadows.
The differences in these two cases between RTX ON and OFF were subtle, but then it was Metro Exodus who applied ray tracing at the lighting level and that made the game overall superb.
Other titles have also been announced that will support Nvidia technology, but there are still few tracked games and the cost of performance is still too high. To bring technology to more people, the studio Nvidia LightSpeed has rebuilt the classic FPS of Quake II with RTX. The demo is free and you can try ray tracing and a GTX card, but it's not recommended because the performance drop is spectacular.
The famous hit of 1997 is the first game in the world with a trace, which presents unified lighting effects such as shadows, reflexes and refractions in a single ray tracing algorithm.
I've tested the Quake II RTX and I came back when I was eight or nine years old and I discovered all the successes of that era. As soon as I entered the game, I remembered the menu, the loading screen and the starting scene with the ship collapsed into a corner of the room. However, something was out of place: the game looked too good on an ultra-wide monitor with a resolution of 3440 x 1440 pixels. Of course, the textures were still too erased and the characters too square, but the atmosphere, the light and the shadows were from 2019.
Change the face of Quake II with RTX
We went into the parameters and switched from RTX to OpenGl and the differences were noticeable. The textures of the environment, weapons and enemies were more polished on RTX, better lit, more realistic and darker. This new variant was almost like a new game, especially if the game mechanics changed, but here we are talking about a makeover and not a remake.
I went through several levels (and my memories in front of a Pentium (I do not know which version) playing Quake II) and I went from RTX to OpenGL to see the differences. It's amazing how much a scene can change light. The incredible difference seemed to me in a scene where I was in the water and where I could also see the sky. When I switched to the old graphic mode, I thought something had broken, that it had crashed, but it was not just the only thing I had. old Quake II.
We tested the game on a PC with a Ryzen 5x 1500x 3.7 GHz processor, a Nvidia 2080 Ti video card and a 16 GB HyperX RAM memory. I mentioned that because I have to tell you the performance. Yes, it's a 22-year-old game, but ray tracking is a new technology that requires a lot of video cards. Thus, Quake II (with all the maximum settings) worked at 40-50 FPS with RTX and without jocull it reached 1000 FPS.
The difference is huge and I want to show you that even the most powerful RTX video card for consumers is hampered by the ray tracing technology. Of course, there would have been a better processor in this configuration and probably would have stayed at 60 frames per second at the WQHD resolution, but the idea is still valid. Spray throwing still requires too much resources for most players.
Yes, Quake II remastering is a Nvidia marketing research tool that would like to introduce this new technology to more of a look, precisely because there are not many new titles where you can see it, and that the RTX application still has too much effect on performance.
But what is clear to me is that this new method of making lights, reflexes and refractions in a game is the future, that we see the effects on future consoles or PCs.
Finally, the Quake II RTX is like a vintage car that has restored your body, but the same problems are inside. So you'd better take a dazed but functional dacia outdoors, but the vintage car (in this case, the Quake II RTX) is so beautiful that you think twice.
Source link
