Right around when Nvidia was pushing their RTX cards hard, they also decided to see what Quake II would look like with some ray tracing tossed in. The result was a fairly decent visual upgrade for the aged id Software first-person shooter. Since then, Nvidia has gone on to recreate the entire game and now they’re giving away this demo to anyone who owns an RTX graphics card on June 6th, 2019.
The catch is that this demo is restricted to just three levels. Meaning if you want to play the entire game, you’ll need the full version of Quake II. If you’re like me, you likely owned a copy of Quake II but have somehow lost it over the ages. Thankfully, you can still purchase the full version of Quake 2 on Steam for just $4.99
This demo will be available for both Windows and Linux OS’s, thanks to the game running on the Vulkan API. Expect to see some huge performance gains, not that the game is very GPU or CPU intensive in this day and age
Judging from the announcement trailer for this RTX Quake II, I definitely need to try it out. I spent many a day playing Quake II, as well as developing several maps for the game. And seeing how I do own an RTX graphics card, this would be my first ray tracing game to test out.