Quake Demo Continues to Blow Minds at GTC

Quake Demo

So, you may have seen some demonstrations of Quake running on RTX in recent weeks. However, this is something that is literally still being developed. Nvidia showed the game running in its original single core, single thread format.

However, modern CPUs are so damn fast, the whole thing was possible to render in software. That’s not a big shock though, Quake is bloody old now. Demanding back in the day, not today.

They then switched over to the RTX version. Night and day difference. They haven’t just thrown in some lighting though. Now they have created the levels using material rendering. Stone, metal, glass, all behave as they should visually. As light, ray traced, of course, runs over the level you can see the dynamics as you would in real-life.

They then added both scene light souces, as well as global illumination and shadows. On top of that, we have ray tracing effects from the weapons too. Rockets illuminate dark corridors as they flay away. The BFG bathes everything in green lighting, casting stark shadows in its wake.

Open Source

Nvidia are working to help push this to the next level. What’s more, they’re going to contribute it all back to open source when they’re done. As a demo and learning tool for how RTX works, it’s perfect. It’s a game every developer will be somewhat familiar with. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s out there, so we can all have a tinker with the code, or ya know, play it!