Quake 2 is over two decades old and yet the id Software classic is one of my favourite games of this year, radically re-invented from a visual perspective thanks to the ray traced remastering from Nvidia's Lightspeed Studios (based on original work by Christophe Schied). It's one of the most impressive examples of hardware-accelerated RT and thanks to the new 1.2 patch released a few days ago, a phenomenal game now looks a whole lot better.
One might think that Nvidia would simply move on from the Quake 2 project and concentrate efforts on the ray traced upgrades for other titles that are being worked on behind the scenes, but the improvements to the 1.2 upgrade are quite profound - and the most noticeable change comes from upgraded art assets. While the original Quake 2 RTX launch used physically-based variants of Quake 2 XP textures, not all of them appeared to receive the same level of love and attention. A key focus for the 1.2 upgrade has been to re-assess many material properties and get them looking just right.
Metal and how it interacts with lighting has changed immensely. The original release had metalwork that appeared to lack much in the way of specular properties, so even with the hyper-realistic path traced lighting, the material looked more like stone than metal. It's all change in 1.2, with art changes that dramatically change and improve many scenes. There are micro-level improvements too. For example, the original remaster's shotgun shells in ammo boxes use matte materials that show little differentiation between the box material and the shells themselves. Version 1.2 now sees individual cartridges exhibit metallic sheen and emphasise the coloured metals on the jacket.
from Eurogamer.net
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