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Great news for AMD fans as Quake II RTX has been updated again, and it now features support for the newly released official cross-vendor Ray Tracing support with the Vulkan API.

With Vulkan, originally only NVIDIA supported Ray Tracing with their own extensions. That's no longer needed, as The Khronos Group formally announced the final and finished Ray Tracing specification for the Vulkan API back in late November.

Quake II RTX was one of the earliest titles to have Ray Tracing, and acted as something of a quick playground just to test out the features available. It was built on top of existing work from Q2VKPT from Christoph Schied with NVIDIA adding in new path-traced visual effects, improved textures and so on.

Pictured - shots taken from Quake II RTX on Linux with Ray Tracing on.

Thanks to an update to Quake II RTX released today, it adds support for the new official Vulkan Ray Tracing API and enables dynamic selection between NVIDIA's stuff and the new stuff. Any GPU and driver that supports VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline will now work with the Ray Tracing here. Additionally, they also added in "temporal upscaling, or TAAU".

Quake II RTX 1.4.0 comes with various other improvements too including SDL2 upgrades, lots of bug fixes, further enhancements to the visuals like more stable reflections and refractions, reduced blurring in the temporal filter and more.

Find Quake II RTX on Steam with the first three levels free, the rest available if you buy Quake 2 directly. The source code to it can be found on GitHub if you wish to learn from it.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: AMD, FPS, NVIDIA, Steam, Vulkan | Apps: Quake II RTX
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ageres Dec 15, 2020
QuoteAny GPU and driver that supports VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline will now work with the Ray Tracing here.
But what GPUs support that? Is there a list?
BielFPs Dec 15, 2020
Any chance this could work in my Rx580 and my Rx540?
Xpander Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: ageres
QuoteAny GPU and driver that supports VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline will now work with the Ray Tracing here.
But what GPUs support that? Is there a list?

All card the driver supports. List is here: https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/167671/en-us
Tori Dec 15, 2020
I assume no AMD card handles this yet? Open and Closed Sourced drivers included.
Zappor Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: ToriI assume no AMD card handles this yet? Open and Closed Sourced drivers included.

I guess this is the first thing that you can test AMDs Vulkan RT support on _Windows_ with, but no Vulkan RT on Linux yet afaik.
3zekiel Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: ToriI assume no AMD card handles this yet? Open and Closed Sourced drivers included.

Seems no indeed. Is only beta here too. Wait and see. I read this morning in Discord from Guy that DLSS is worked upon too: https://discord.com/channels/277857463384932353/653300722003214348/788105568812138498

That seems real good, because RT without DLSS is quite a hit on performance anyway.


Last edited by 3zekiel on 15 December 2020 at 3:46 pm UTC
Zappor Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: Zappor
Quoting: ToriI assume no AMD card handles this yet? Open and Closed Sourced drivers included.

I guess this is the first thing that you can test AMDs Vulkan RT support on _Windows_ with, but no Vulkan RT on Linux yet afaik.

Oh, this is an NVIDIA project on GitHub.

And I guess that's a big no on AMD since it checks that you're running the correct Nvidia driver version:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/commit/a4d5017e8fd2a14d76fabfff77a7257a35f59d53

(didn't 100% read through the code...)
Linas Dec 15, 2020
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Not seeing VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline extension on my Vega 56. And unsurprisingly it doesn't start.
Anza Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: Zappor
Quoting: Zappor
Quoting: ToriI assume no AMD card handles this yet? Open and Closed Sourced drivers included.

I guess this is the first thing that you can test AMDs Vulkan RT support on _Windows_ with, but no Vulkan RT on Linux yet afaik.

Oh, this is an NVIDIA project on GitHub.

And I guess that's a big no on AMD since it checks that you're running the correct Nvidia driver version:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/commit/a4d5017e8fd2a14d76fabfff77a7257a35f59d53

(didn't 100% read through the code...)

I checked little bit more of the code from that commit and if I understand the code correctly, check is run only on Windows and if GPU is nVidia.

At the moment anyway having AMD support is boon for nVidia as they have clear advantage in ray tracing performance, especially when combined with DLSS.
slaapliedje Dec 15, 2020
If there ever was a time to make a Firefly quote, it is now.

"Shiny."
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