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.

Direct Link
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.
I'm kind of excited to see my beloved classic shooter in such nice visuals :D
Oh NVIDIA, you have me, I don't appreciate all of what you're doing especially your efforts in cutting down AMD in the GPU market with NVIDIA exclusive frameworks such as Hairworx, PhysX and all the other Nvidia Game works stuff which is STILL not available for Linux, I mean c'mon NVidia ... whats that?
But now you MIGHT prevent me from switching from NVidia to AMD GPUs ... MAYBEEEEEE. Let's see where this all leads to. And what AMDs new Navi GPU will offer :D
Edit:
Btw. whats about the 430.14 driver, dose it have those extensions? I'd like to try it our with my GTX 1080 and probably failing ^^"
Edit 2: Okay according to vulkaninfo it's there :D
Last edited by Vortex_Acherontic on 6 June 2019 at 4:12 pm UTC
With my Kernel Linux 5.1.6 the only method for compile is:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-418.52.10.run --no-unified-memory --no-drm
But, with these switches I don't have CUDA. Seems important for Nvidia card, if not tell me please.
Even though it may not seem like much, I'm still quite impressed with it as a tech demo. Doing diffuse path tracing for lighting in insanely computationally expensive. My own little renders in Blender's Cycles renderer took 10 hours to do. Doing anything in realtime at all is pretty amazing.
Quoting: rustybroomhandleThis is nice as a tech demo and great as a source reference for developers, but compared to the original, this looks uuuuugly. It's so bright and all the atmosphere has been lost.Yeah, it's a bit like the “sitcom effect” (or “soap-opera effect” if you prefer) you get with high-framerate video. It looks too real. Sometimes “better” is worse.
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