Quake II RTX is out now, and it’s ready to eat your GPU

Back in January, I wrote that Quake II was the best argument for Nvidia’s ray-tracing graphics cards. Obviously, the company heard me, because it has released its own RTX Remaster of the classic shooter (in partnership with Bethesda). You can download Quake II RTX Remastered on Steam right now. If you don’t already own the original Quake II, Nvidia’s version includes the first three levels for free. If you do own Quake II, you can play the whole game with fully path-traced lighting.

So what’s the big deal here? Well, Nvidia hasn’t changed anything about Quake II except for the way the lighting works. The company took the open-source code for the game and compiled it with its RTX technologies. That includes ray tracing for global illumination, shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion. All of that works together to create a really excellent demonstration of what ray tracing can do for game visuals.