There seems to be a lot of hay going around about ray-tracing technology in video games. That stuff where lights reflect off of surfaces that makes it look more like real life. Probably the biggest technology arms race next to high dynamic range rendering and accurate water physics. For a modern video game, ray-tracing can be a valuable tool to make your game world feel more alive. But not so much if you’re trying to bolt on ray-tracing to an old shooter from 1997.
Quake II RTX is a remaster of the 1997 shooter classic, but with the engine upgraded to support NVIDIA’s RTX ray-tracing technology. Released on June 6, 2019 for PC by NVIDIA’s in-house Lightspeed Studios, this game was made as a way to show off their fancy new RTX technology. Quoting from NVIDIA’s blog:
“We are giving Quake II back to gamers with a bold new look, as Quake II RTX,” said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “Ray tracing is the technology that is defining the next generation of PC games, and it’s fitting that Quake II is a part of that.”
Now, I personally have my doubts that a remaster of a shooter that’s nearly 30 years old truly defines the next generation of video gaming, but I don’t work at NVIDIA. It’s not like this kind of marginal upgrade hasn’t existed beforehand: Doom95 as a shell to play Doom and Doom II in Windows 95 without needing to run DOS, GLQuake being an OpenGL render for Quake back when graphics accelerator cards were still new to the PC market, that sort of thing. Usually if you wanna tout this technology you’d use a fairly recent game. But let’s see how Lightspeed took Quake II and made it look shiny and pretty for a modern PC audience.
Since there might be folks who are wondering: I had this article idea before Microsoft announced using their Copilot generative AI demo that trained off Quake II data as a base. This was merely a coincidence. In fact, what did inspire me to write about this was another RTX game that just came out: Half-Life 2 RTX, a version of Half-Life 2 that uses the RTX technology, just done by a group of modders rather than in-house at NVIDIA Lightspeed in the case of Quake II RTX and Portal with RTX.
Now, I’ve talked at length about Quake II several times over the years. Mostly the unofficial expansions like Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II and maps made to advertise a mostly forgotten ‘90s TV show. But my opinion on the original Quake II hasn’t really changed much: It’s a solid shooter that feels kinda bland artistically. It’s the embodiment of the John Carmack era of id Software: Fancy technology over anything else. It’s a perfectly fine game, and the Nightdive remaster from 2023 rebalanced the game a bit to push it from being merely a solid game for its time, to standing with the id classics like Doom and Quake in a much better light.
At the time I did not have a computer that could really handle running Quake II RTX smoothly. My previous PC, which housed a GeForce GTX 1060, was not enough to hit the specifications to turn on the RTX features. Once I got my current computer, which has a GTX 3070 in it, I was able to run Q2RTX pretty smoothly at around 60 frames per second with not much trouble. Much like other tech demos, sometimes it’s worth upgrading the PC just to try it out. Provided it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to upgrade, that is.
The core gameplay of Quake II hasn’t changed in its RTX variation. Enemies, weapons, maps act identically as they would in the original game. All the changes are under the hood, updating the rendering to use that RTX ray-tracing technology to its fullest.
There are some cool elements to this version: You can shoot flares to highlight dark areas — they take the same ammo as your grenades, and the game gives you more grenades to compensate and try this feature out. There’s also the ability to change the time of day on the press of a key (/), which is a nice little feature just to see how different environments can look.
In addition, there’s a host of high-dynamic range rendering options alongside the existing ray-tracing features. Now you can turn these all of this off and go back to the original Quake II software renderer if you want to, but at that point you’ve removed the sole reason you’d actually want to play this version of the game.
One of the coolest things I saw was how they added glowing effects to red lights on the walls, or the glowing red eyes of an enemy Strogg. In a dark area, it gives Quake II almost a horror game kind of vibe. A shame that since the game is an action-packed romp with a rocking soundtrack mostly done by Sascha “Sonic Mayhem” Dikiciyan, so it feels rather incongruous.
Side note: You have to import the soundtrack from an existing CD copy of Quake II or find the music online, the game doesn’t come with any music. This was the case in most re-releases of Quake II until the recent remaster, so I’m not gonna slag Lightspeed for that one.
Other than that, there isn’t a lot else to talk about here. You can play through the base campaign or play some multiplayer matches with other players. (I assume that Q2RTX players can’t play with vanilla Quake II players and vice-versa.) The expansion packs, any custom maps, and gameplay mods likely won’t work with this version out of the box without some significant tweaking. And in the grand scheme of it all, it isn’t quite worth it beyond a mere novelty.
To bring it back to earlier: The whole technology arms race to make things prettier and realistic had me thinking about how I look at video game graphics. There’s always that chase to make the most high quality graphics at all costs. Me, however? I’m fascinated by new tech, but it’s not something I desire to keep up with. I’m not a graphics snob. I will play games on low graphic settings if it means I get solid frame rates in return.
Some examples: I wrote about playing contemporaneous games on an Intel Integrated Graphics Chip back in 2014 and how surprisingly playable these games were on integrated hardware. Me and a friend played through the entirety of Saints Row: The Third while my computer at the time barely hit the minimum specs and ran at sub-20 frames per second on low settings. I’ve never been ahead of the curve when it comes to tech, so I learned over to appreciate a game even in lower quality settings. So while adding ray-tracing to an old video game may wow some of the tech folks like jingling a set of keys, it just doesn’t do anything for me. It’s like that motion smoothing effect on TVs that makes everything look like soap operas. It’s bad.
To me, this is a big problem with the gaming industry. We keep chasing those technical highs at the cost of making something look good artistically. It makes me think of those people who do “HD remakes” of games like Doom on Unreal Engine 5 and it looks like a hot mess. The kind of folks who see a high-quality Mario model running in an open field and go “Nintendo, Hire This Man.” And while I love sites like Digital Foundry sometimes, I don’t like how they lean a lot into the smoothness and shininess of how technology looks, rather than whether it fits the game artistically.
This ends up bleeding a lot into the gaming community, where they’ll compare games from 15 years ago and think newer games are “inferior” because you can’t see fruit randomly destroy into bits like you could in the older game. This tech race just leads to developers wasting time on stupid shit that doesn’t matter to placate nerds and shareholders who want the game to Do All The Things, even if it’s not really practical from a gameplay or technical perspective. It’s ridiculous.
That’s the rub with me and Quake II RTX. It looks like a fake video game you’d see on an old sitcom as a B-plot. This is the problem when you let the technical side of a game studio take the reigns of a game’s look over the artistic side: It just feels fake. Quake II may not be the most stylistic game out there, but it has an art style compared to Q2RTX. It’s the best example of that Ian Malcolm conundrum from Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were too preoccupied with whether or not you could, that you didn’t stop to think if you should.”
I feel bad slagging off the folks at NVIDIA Lightspeed who likely did this mostly as a passion project and a tech demo, but this didn’t need to exist. I cannot deny this is impressive from a technological standpoint, but that’s all it has going for it.
It was fun to go through this again and realize how solid but unremarkable Quake II is as a game, but I could honestly do that anywhere else and not have it turn my computer into a portable space heater. Whatever happened to the days where you’d make a small game to show off your new tech, like Cellfactor Revolution? That makes a bigger impact than anything Quake II RTX could. (I swear this is the second time in a row I’ve mentioned that game. If only I could get it to play on my modern PC…)
Quake II RTX is free on Steam and other PC platforms. The game comes with the demo for Quake II, which gives you the first few levels, but if you wanna play the full game you have to own Quake II on Steam. But honestly, you’d be better off just installing YamagiQ2 or even grabbing the Nightdive Quake II remaster. They may not look technically impressive compared to Q2RTX, but it at least it plays well. And it doesn’t destroy the game’s art style at the cost of making your computer melt.
Maybe one day I’ll look into the other RTX-powered games, like Portal and Half-Life 2. I don’t have high hopes, but it has been a while since I last played either of those games…
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