Raytraced Quake 2: Love at First Sight

Have a look at Q2VKPT which is basically Quake II that is entirely raytraced, efficiently simulating fully dynamic lighting in real-time, with the same modern techniques as used in the movie industry. Yeah, the models here are the same, and the team behind the project didn’t do anything about the textures, but the game now looks amazing with this special raytraced atmosphere.

“The recent release of GPUs with raytracing capabilities has opened up entirely new possibilities for the future of game graphics, yet making good use of raytracing is non-trivial. While some games have started to explore improvements in shadow and reflection rendering, Q2VKPT is the first project to implement an efficient unified solution for all types of light transport: direct, scattered, and reflected light,” states Christoph Schied.

The developer describes it as a proof-of-concept for computer graphics research and the game industry. What is more, it can give you a glimpse into the potential future of game graphics. “Besides the use of hardware-accelerated raytracing, Q2VKPT mainly gains its efficiency from an adaptive image filtering technique that intelligently tracks changes in the scene illumination to re-use as much information as possible from previous computations.”

The project was created by Christoph Schied as “a spare-time project to validate the results of computer graphics research in an actual game.” The project is said to encompass 12K lines of code, completely replacing the original Quake II graphics code.

The game is now open-source on GitHub, integrating a Vulkan path tracer into the Q2PRO client. You can learn more here.