Quake 2 version released with ray tracing effects

Graphic developers have just released a version of Quake 2 with Ray Tracing, claiming to be "the first playable game to fully utilize Ray Tracing technology and to efficiently simulate fully dynamic lighting in real time."

Q2VKPT is Quake 2 using Ray Tracing technology

To call it a Quake 2 mod is an understatement, as the project represents a Vulkan rewrite of most of the Q2PRO rendering code, which itself is a massive modification of Quake 2. The researchers claim that the project “aims to serve as proof of concept for both computer graphics research and the video game industry, ”and serves to glimpse a future in which Ray Tracing has replaced rasterization.

VKPT and Q2VKPT were created by Christoph Schied as a free time project to see the results of Ray Tracing technology in a real time game. The project currently spans 12, 000 lines of code and completely replaces the original Quake II graphics code. Initially, it was designed for OpenGL with contributions from Johannes Hanika (Experimental Ray Tracing, Shaders, GL / Vulkan Fixes), Addis Dittebrandt (Light Hierarchy, Debug Visualization), Tobias Zirr (Light Sampling, Hack Supervision and Instigation, Website, Info Texts), and Florian Reibold (Initial Light Hierarchy). Stephan Bergmann, Emanuel Schrade, Alisa Jung and Christoph Peters (made a little noise) provided additional help to the project, which then switched to using the Vulkan API.

If you want to try it, you can download the initial version on the project's Github page.

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