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Quake II RTX released with a demo along and the source code

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For those with newer NVIDIA GPUs, you can now try out Quake II RTX which just released with Linux support. Really nice to see Lightspeed Studios and NVIDIA make Linux a first-class citizen for this with same-day support.

As a reminder on what it is:

Quake II RTX is fully ray-traced and includes the 3 levels from the original shareware distribution.

Quake II RTX builds on the work of Christoph Schied and the team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, who added ray tracing to Quake II to create Q2VKPT (in turn building upon the Q2PRO code base). NVIDIA has introduced new path-traced visual effects, has improved texturing, and has made dozens of other changes and improvements, resulting in an experience that rivals games created today, and pushes your RTX hardware to the limit.

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If you own the original Quake II, it can work with the files to unlock the full game and give you online multiplayer too.

For the Linux version, if you have a card older than the GeForce 20 series, you will need to use the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver at least version 418.52.05 which included support for the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension for certain older models. For those with newer NVIDIA GPUs like the NVIDIA 2060 and above you will need at least driver version 410.66, which added in the ray tracing support.

You can grab it from Steam or the official NVIDIA website. You can also find the full source code (minus assets) on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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sub Jun 7, 2019
Quoting: GuestOMG, it ran faster on my Voodoo 20 years back :-)

And I'm sure, I was more impressed back then! :)

(Had a shiny new Voodoo 2 at the time, iirc)

Edit: Also, impressive how id software managed to release Quake 2 just slightly more than one year after Quake 1.


Last edited by sub on 7 June 2019 at 9:25 am UTC
slaapliedje Jun 7, 2019
Quoting: sub
Quoting: GuestOMG, it ran faster on my Voodoo 20 years back :-)

And I'm sure, I was more impressed back then! :)

(Had a shiny new Voodoo 2 at the time, iirc)

Edit: Also, impressive how id software managed to release Quake 2 just slightly more than one year after Quake 1.
My system ran at 31-34 FPS solid. I thought it was much faster before I turned on the FPS indicator in the settings, but it ran very smoothly. Then again I have a i9-9900k, and a 2080 RTX.

I tried to tell it where my Quake II install was for the full game, but the file selector was kind of janky, so I beat the free levels already. Need to figure out how to ask me where the levels are again!
iwantlinuxgames Jun 8, 2019
Quoting: slaapliedje<snip>
I tried to tell it where my Quake II install was for the full game, but the file selector was kind of janky, so I beat the free levels already. Need to figure out how to ask me where the levels are again!
cd $STEAM_INSTALL_DIRECTORY/steamapps/common/Quake II RTX/./find-retail-paks.sh
however, it will probably still fail...failed for me.....i just copied EVERYTHING in my quake 2 install directory to the Quake II RTX directory, and skipped anything it wanted to overwrite, except pak0.pak. you WANT to overwrite pak0.pak with the one from your retail install.


Last edited by iwantlinuxgames on 8 June 2019 at 2:47 am UTC
loothelion Jun 8, 2019
Quoting: slaapliedjeI tried to tell it where my Quake II install was for the full game, but the file selector was kind of janky, so I beat the free levels already. Need to figure out how to ask me where the levels are again!

Hi, this is a known issue with q2rtx-1.0.0 on Linux, a fix for it ( https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/pull/1 ) will be included in the next release. Until the officially available builds (Steam / Standalone) are updated you can do one of the following:

1. Grab the updated version of find-retail-paks.sh from our GitHub page:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/master/setup/find-retail-paks.sh

2. Manually copy over the retail PAK files and players/ directory into your ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2 directory.
slaapliedje Jun 8, 2019
Quoting: iwantlinuxgames
Quoting: slaapliedje<snip>
I tried to tell it where my Quake II install was for the full game, but the file selector was kind of janky, so I beat the free levels already. Need to figure out how to ask me where the levels are again!
cd $STEAM_INSTALL_DIRECTORY/steamapps/common/Quake II RTX/./find-retail-paks.sh
however, it will probably still fail...failed for me.....i just copied EVERYTHING in my quake 2 install directory to the Quake II RTX directory, and skipped anything it wanted to overwrite, except pak0.pak. you WANT to overwrite pak0.pak with the one from your retail install.
Yeah, that's what I ended up doing.
Avehicle7887 Jun 8, 2019
Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: Avehicle7887(...)

Wait, is it Windows or Linux in the screenshot? I am confused :D

It's Linux, themed to look like Windows :)
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