When Nvidia showed off their ray traced Quake II demo at the beginning of the year, everyone (including our own Alec, RPS in peace) went a bit nuts for it. Despite being a heck of a lot older than all the other shiny RTX games on show, it was Quake II that really made people sit up and pay attention to what Nvidia’s new fancy pants reflection tech could really bring to the table. And now, Nvidia are releasing a full version of Quake II RTX on June 6 from GeForce.com, with the first three levels available for absolutely nothing – just like they were back in the good old shareware days.

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With the arrival of the RTX 2060, we now have four [cms-block] cards that can take advantage of the GPU giant’s cool new graphics features, such as their reflection-enhancing ray tracing magic and performance-boosting DLSS tech. But not all games can do both things at the same time, and many more still have no confirmed support for ray tracing and DLSS at all. So I thought I’d do the hard work for you and put everything in a nice, big list, detailing every ray tracing and DLSS game confirmed so far. The list is still quite small at the moment, but if you’re thinking about upgrading to either the RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080 or RTX 2080 Ti, then these are the games that are going to get the most out of them.

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The other week, I got my y-fronts in a bunch about how some clever fella had added raytracing to Quake II. A 22-year-old first-person shooter had effectively beaten everyone else to the punch when it came to the new*, more naturalistic form of game lighting currently only available (at least without calamitous performance) on the most recent Nvidia RTX cards. (You can do it a bit, sort of, in Battlefield V, but that’s it for now).

But I couldn’t play the bally thing, as I didn’t have an RTX graphics card. Now I do, for a bit, so I’ve been back to give 1997’s old Stroggs a 2019 paint job. Here’s a spot of compare and contrast, and quick thoughts on whether or not it was worth it.

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“Daddy, why are you cross?”

“Because, my little one, someone’s just added some lovely-looking raytraced lighting to seminal 90s first-person shooter Quake II, but I am unable to experience it myself because I don’t own an RTX-series graphics card. Now repeat what I just said back to me flawlessly, or you’re sleeping in the shed again tonight.”

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Have you played the Quake II mod CrateDM? If so, please tell me all about it. It’s a simple but oh so wonderful idea, which is best explained in its readme file: “CrateDM pits opponents against each other in a room full of crates, and the players are crates.” That’s it. All-crates Quake 2 deathmatch. Before Old Man Murray even created their Crate Review System, CrateDM was at the cutting edge of crate culture.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Quake has seen plenty of mods adding oodles of wacky weapons but the one that most caught my eye was Chaos Deathmatch [official site] for Quake II. If you weren’t poisoned and being chased by smiley-faced homing proximity mines while juggling another player with an air blaster, you were missing out.

… [visit site to read more]

‘Played’ isn’t quite the right word for Hardly Workin’ [archived official site]. You may need Quake II for it but Hardly Workin’ is machinima – a movie made in a video game, before that term was yoinked by a site which became a #contentnetwork. What made Hardly Workin’ stand out to me was that you could hardly see it was Quake II. While most early machinima drafted existing in-game characters and assets for action figure pantomimes (and heck, Red vs. Blue still does this – no disrespect), Hardly Workin’ is built from scratch for a silly cartoon tale about two lumberjacks getting jobs in a diner.

… [visit site to read more]

I remember when I turned 15. It was pretty unspectacular. I couldn’t drive yet, I didn’t really have much of a party to speak of, and hardly any of the entire Internet used it as an opportunity to fondly reminisce about rocket jumps and murder. But now, Quake II turns 15, and suddenly it gets the royal treatment. Bizarre, right? It really is just the darndest thing. Maybe everyone’s still waiting to leap out and surprise me. I bet that’s it. Any second now. While we’re waiting, though, I suppose we can discuss some crazy Quake II factoids. But only just for a bit. And you have to put on this party hat and pretend to be having fun. I demand it.

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