Here is Quake 2 Path Tracing running on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti at 1920×1080


YouTube’s ‘Thavex’ has shared a video, showing Quake 2 Path Tracing running on the latest high-end GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti. In case you weren’t aware of, this real-time path tracing is possible thanks to Amietia; a from-scratch GPU-based pathtracer created specifically for Quake 2.

Amietia – which you can download from here – has several optimisations which are only viable due to the typical characteristics of Quake 2 such as support for parallogram-shaped lightsources, BSP ray traversal, and special handling of sky ‘surfaces’ (portals).

Now us you will notice, there is a lot of noise (which is a side-effect to the low samples that are used for the real-time path tracing). From what I know its developer has not used any de-noiser which is a shame. Not only that, but this GPU-based pathtracer does not take advantage of the RTX2080Ti tensor cores.

What ultimately this means is that this special version of Quake 2 could run significantly faster on the RTX2080Ti. Thavex has used an an i7-6700k (overclocked to 4.7Ghz) alongside the NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080Ti and ran the game at 1920×1080. It’s not entirely smooth but keep in mind that we’re talking about full path tracing in real-time.

Here is hoping that someone will resume development for this GPU pathtracer so that it can take advantage of the Tensor Cores (a de-noiser filter would also be a welcome addition)!

Quake 2 Real time Ray Tracing on nVidia RTX 2080 Ti FE