Quake 2 Mod Allows For Real Time Ray Tracing

Quake 2

It has been over 20 years now since Quake 2 was released. Despite this, however, the game still remains remarkably popular amongst fans. A popularity that was no doubt helped by its subsequent arrival on Steam from its humble big box cd-rom days. It seems, however, that despite being nearly 22-year old, there is life in the old game yet.

In a report via DSOGaming, a new mod (Q2VKPT) has introduced a full, real-time, ray tracing experience to the game. Yes, Quake 2 is more compatible with the Nvidia 20XX graphics cards than you might have guessed!

How Does It Work?

This mod isn’t just a replication of ray-tracing like experience. It actually genuinely uses that part of the Nvidia graphics card.

The team behind the mod has said: “Its physically-based simulation of light allows highly realistic rendering. Path tracing uses Raytracing in order to determine the visibility in-between scattering events. However, Raytracing is merely a primitive operation that can be used for many things. Therefore, Raytracing alone does not automatically produce realistic images. Light transport algorithms like Path tracing can be used for that. However, while elegant and very powerful, naive path tracing is very costly and takes a long time to produce stable images. This project uses a smart adaptive filter that re-uses as much information as possible across many frames and pixels in order to produce robust and stable images.”

Where Can I Try It Out?

Well,  you will need to own a copy of Quake 2. Oh, and a Nvidia 20XX graphics card if you want it to work. Sorry if that was a little obvious. You can, however, download the mod for free via the link here!

The mod, however, does represent something much larger than it might appear. It shows that it is possible to bring ray tracing to older games that were not specifically designed for it. As such, could this open the doors to a bunch of patches and updates for recently remastered releases? I wouldn’t be surprised!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!