I'm very skeptical.

This is not just RTT; there's a big amount of rework. Likely, any old game would look significantly better with such development effort (in other words, with any good remastering).

This could be considered a great market stunt - the graphical improvement is touted to be due to RTX (ray tracing), while it's actually due to many factors.

On top of that, it misleads people into thinking that this type of improvement is typical of ray tracing, and that it comes at virtually no cost, while currently, ray tracing takes a big performance hit, and it's generally hard to notice.

Q2VKPT is close to the concept "improved with ray tracing", and while certainly impressive, it doesn't yield the same "AMAZING!" effect.

But it's not down to polygons or details in the environment - the simple architecture still looks realistic with the addition of realistic lighting. In the quest for realism, modern games have so many details, dirt and grit everywhere [1]. Perhaps going forward artists can let the lighting do more work and still represent realistic clean environments. I loved this blocky room in Half Life 1 for the dramatic (prebaked) lighting: http://combineoverwiki.net/images/thumb/3/37/C2a4e_lobby.jpg...

[1] just look at Doom 2016: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/20160...

A whole lot of the benefit is the added "normal and roughness maps for added surface detail."

If they hadn't done the hard work of basically retexturing every single surface, it wouldn't look half as good. Without depth, ray-tracing looks incredibly flat, like this: http://builder.openhmd.net/blender-hmd-viewport-temp/_images...

I believe the origanal proof of concept didn't do the retexturing, and just focused on the lighting; it looks fantastic: http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/

How hard would it be to automatically derive such maps from textures? After all, they are already drawn to visually imply that with shading, so wouldn't it be possible to e.g. train a model to extract that information, just as our eye does?

> it's actually due to many factors

To add to this point, at 1:35 in the video they compare with / without volumetric ligthing except, well, volumetric lighting has been used in games for a while now.

The "before" should show a non-RTX lighting instead of just nothing at all.

I remember one of the big selling points of the Dreamcast in 1998 was volumetric lighting.

Fun fact: The Dreamcast GPU was a precursor to the PowerVR GPUs used in iPhones and many Androids.

Also, Qualcomm’s popular Adreno line on Android GPUs has its roots in the Xbox360 GPU.

Unreal, a Quake 2 contemporary, already had it and managed it on meager hardware like P200MMX

If you consider a slide show "managing it", then sure.

My P200MMX with a Voodoo 2 managed it just fine.

It was more that Voodoo than the MMX. I tried playing some MMX "accelerated" games and it was a lo-fi slideshow.

I think the MMX era was the start of Intel's tradition of hyped up graphics related press releases followed by a total lack of execution.

MMX was useless for games. MMX is Integer math only, good for DSP, things like audio filters, or making a softmodem out of your sound card. Unsuitable for accelerating 3D games. Whats worse MMX has no dedicated registers, and instead reuses/shares FPU ones, this means you cant use MMX and FPU (all 3D code pre Direct3D 7 Hardware T&L) at the same time.

All comes down to Microsoft and Intel coming up with a concept of purely software peripherals around 1997. Intel released things like MMX, AC'97, Communications and Networking Riser (CNR), and audio/modem riser (AMR) standards, all in an effort to push hardware vendors out of the market by handling those roles in software by the CPU. More work for CPU = more demand for fast CPUs = more profit.

Funnily enough AMDs 1998 3DNow! did actually add floating point support to MMX and was useful for 3D acceleration until hardware T&L came along 2 years later.

Intel Paid few dev houses to release make believe MMX enhancements, like POD (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/51358-pod-windows-...

1/6 of box covered with Intel MMX advertising while game used it only for some sound effects. Intel repeated this trick in 99 while introducing Pentium 3 with SSE. Intel commissioned Rage Software to build a demo piece showcasing P3 during Comdex Fall. It worked .. by cheating with graphic details ;-) Quoting hardware.fr "But looking closely at the demo, we notice - as you can see on the screenshots - that the SSE version is less detailed than the non-SSE version (see the ground). Intel would you try to roll the journalists in the flour?". Of course Anandtech used this never released publicly cheating demo pretending to be a game in all of their Pentium 3 tests for over a year.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=65247&start=20#p...

MMX was always more selling point than substance, from my experience... a Voodoo card, on the other hand...

Glide, man, such a great era for PC gaming if you had the right equipment.

I'll never forgive the computer store guy when I was 14 who pushed me to buy the $40 cheaper S3 Trio3D instead of the Voodoo. Instead of something useful, I ended up with a glorified paperweight that only worked well for Direct3D. Guess how many games back then bothered to use that?

I think I got Quake 1 with some shitty hacked MiniGL driver working _once_.

Heheh, I ended up in the same boat. Enamoured with tile based rendering (and the lower price) I bought the PowerVR based Apocalypse 3dx which also had a shortage of supported titles.

All my school friends had 3dfx cards. Didn’t get to do 3D gaming until I bought a Radeon 8500 many years later!

Still have my 3dx actually...it was a very interesting card:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series1_(NEC)

https://videocardz.net/videologic-apocalypse-3dx-4mb/

Yeah checking out some of the comparison photos and the textures have definitely received a bump in resolution/quality.

Most obvious to me in the quake logo/skull on the left of this[1] image.

1. https://images.nvidia.com/geforce-com/international/comparis...

> Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more!

Yes, they should compare it to Quake 2 XP which is already a nice improvement over the original graphics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uurJ-zjhok

Given all the additions they should've placed less emphasis on the before/after. The really cool thing about the demo isn't "look how great a remastered version of Quake 2 can look", it's "look, we can run an entire game in real-time with nothing but raytracing, even if it requires a low polygon count". The Metro and Battlefield demos only use RTX for small pieces of their environment where it has the greatest effect; this is a whole level using no rasterization at all. The other improvements distracted from that somewhat.

I was thinking the same thing. They re-textured and enabled RTX. So it would be nice to see the new game turn RTX on / off and see whats the actual difference. Just that feature.

Not sure what can you be skeptical about. The difference from RT Quake to Quake it’s only that the lights are not precompiled at the beginning of the level. Any other game just need to rework the light baking step to use RTX and job done.

The only downside that can be pointed out is that you are hardware dependent. Would be amazing to see thing in a console, all games with dynamic lighting would help developer and gamers.

> The difference from RT Quake to Quake it’s only that the lights are not precompiled

In the linked demo video they also use new high resolution textures. Which include not only color data as in the original Quake, but also normal maps and maps with PBR parameters (metalness, roughness).

That's not the only difference shown in the video. IN the official keynote when Jensen was talking about it he specifically said the "RTX Off" was using the software rasterizer. So it's not comparing Vulkin RTX on with Vulkin RTX off but Vulkin RTX On with Software rendering on.

Now it's not like it's only an engine change, for this to work they added PBR layers (metalness, emission, normal, yada yada) to all textures here, and that's a big artistic work.

That said… gimme gimme gimme Half Life 1, plssssssss :D !

HL1: Yes please, it would look so cool.

> they added PBR layers

and fluid simulation for explosions

I'd rolling in joy for Max Payne and GTA San Andreas :)

HL1 already has a modern remake, check out 'Black Mesa' on Steam. It's really good.

As someone passionate about hl1, I dont like Black mesa. Yes it looks nice, but gameplay wise it seems lacking to me. It feels very slow to move, bhopping has been nerfed to death.

It feels more like a reboot than a remaster

From what I remember of Black Mesa, it felt more like Half-Life 2, control wise, than Half-Life. So for people who played Half-Life 2 first, Black Mesa probably feels more natural.

This is unsurprising, since they're both on the Source engine.

Maybe teams could use tools like AI Gigapixel (discussed on here yesterday) to upsample older textures?

I agree with you that there is asset work to be done, but I bet there are tools out there that can simplify and automate this process quite a bit today.

I couldn’t find the tool you mentioned but I found a thread on another site about a GAN that can upscale images, and using that one to generate highres textures.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-being-us...

And here's the AI Gigapixel tool:

https://topazlabs.com/ai-gigapixel/

This was the article linked in the thread from yesterday.. It relates to upsampling TV show special effects but I think similar tools could be used:

https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/03/remastering-star-trek...

I would love to see a kickstarter or something to create high quality assets for Open Arena, and add raytracing. Personally, I find that Quake 3 gameplay is more fun than any modern shooter that I've played. It's fast paced, and really well streamlined. It's just pure adrenaline.

Adding things like health regen, cover, alternate fire modes, and so on ultimately just distracts from the action in my opinion. We don't really have any more games like Quake nowadays.

try reflex arena

It's cool, but even back in the day people that competitively played Quake 2 & 3 would turn down every detail to be very low, sans the resolution. In part because it helped with lag, but it also made spotting enemies much easier. The lighting in this demo is very nice, but at least in the Quake world, no one would really use it because it's very distracting, specifically the lighting.

I would use ray tracing to get a non-linear camera, specifically so I could have a wider field of view with less distortion than the linear camera & wide fov. Back on Q3, everyone would use 120 or 130 degree fov because that was the best compromise between seeing things to your side and everything getting squished into the center of your screen. If I could have played with 180, I would have.

Your lighting point is reasonable in the sense that this demo was made to demonstrate the dramatic lighting without respect to gameplay. On the other hand games are already clearly going toward HDR and physical and dramatic lighting. If Quake had HDR lighting, it would look just as good but it would be less distracting because it would have been directed and designed to support the gameplay.

This version also has dynamic adaptation which would have been awesome to have back in the day - some of the dark areas are too dark and it’s great to have the lighting automatically adjust so that at least I can see.

They would as you could use the lighting to spot enemies you can't see directly, like you sometimes can in e.g. CSGO.

Hopefully it doesn't become one of those annoying tropes, though. Like Photoshop lens flares— every game has to have a bunch of arbitrarily reflective materials and light shafts just because the hardware now makes it possible.

When bump mapping was starting to become a thing, every surface had to look ultra glossy for a while (example: http://mojolabs.nz/screenshot.php?id=1740). Eventually the excitement subsided and people used this effect more tastefully. I think most people are just happy with more natural looking lighting though.