Whatever your feelings are on Quake II RTX, it looks like it won’t be the only classic PC game getting Nvidia’s fancy pants ray tracing treatment. A recently posted job ad for Nvidia’s Lightspeed Studios has revealed a new “game remastering program” that aims to bring “some of the greatest titles from the past decades […] into the ray tracing age”. There’s no word yet on exactly what games they’re remastering at the moment, but the first will apparently be a game “you know and love”.

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It’s Gamescom this week, which can only mean one thing – more confirmed ray tracing games for Nvidia’s RTX and selected GTX 16-series graphics cards. Indeed, the big one that’s just been announced is Minecraft, which (like Quake II RTX) is getting full, real-time ray tracing support for everything from water reflections to its entire lighting system. That’s not all, though. Dying Light 2 will also be getting real-time ray tracing, while Tencent’s freshly-announced action survival game Synced: Off-Planet will be getting ray-traced reflections and shadow support.

In truth, the number of games on this list that you can actually play with ray tracing enabled right this second is still pretty small. A lot of the confirmed RTX games you’ll see below still haven’t received their promised ray tracing and performance-boosting DLSS support, so this is more of a complete ‘this is how many games will have it eventually’ kind of thing than ‘these are all the games you can play with ray tracing right now’. Still, if you’re currently on the fence about buying one of Nvidia’s RTX or RTX Super graphics cards as opposed to the new AMD Navi GPUs, this guide should hopefully help you decide whether ray tracing is something worth investing in. Here’s every confirmed ray tracing and DLSS game we know about so far.

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One of the last of the Id Software old guard is parting company with the studio soon. Tim Willits wasn’t part of the original team of founders, but was there early enough to be credited as level designer on 1995’s Ultimate Doom and have a credit in almost everything since. After working as a designer and creative director on the likes of Quake, Doom 3 and Rage, and acting as studio director through the release of Rage 2, he’s left a mark on the FPS genre as we know it. After QuakeCon next week he’ll say his goodbyes and announce his plans for the future.

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The number of confirmed ray tracing games for [cms-block] and selected GTX graphics cards has just got a little bit longer. With E3 2019 in full swing, Nvidia have confirmed that both Watch Dogs Legion and the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will also be getting full ray tracing support, and in the case of Call of Duty, adaptive shading support as well.

That ray tracing games list is still pretty small, admittedly, and the number of games you can find it in right now> can almost be counted on a single hand. Indeed, a lot of confirmed RTX games are yet to receive their ray tracing and performance-boosting DLSS support, so the list below is more of a complete ‘this is how many games will have it eventually’ kind of thing than ‘these are all the games you can play with ray tracing right this very second’. Still, if you’re currently on the fence about buying one of Nvidia’s RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080 or RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards as opposed to one of the new [cms-block] GPUs, this guide should hopefully help you decide whether ray tracing is something worth investing in. Here’s every confirmed ray tracing and DLSS game we know about so far.

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With the arrival of Nvidia’s new GTX ray tracing driver, the number of graphics cards that can now take advantage of the tech giant’s fancy new lighting tech has grown exponentially. In addition to the four new [cms-block] cards, everyone with a 6GB GTX 1060 and up can now get a taste of that ray tracing magic. Sort of.

Alas, the number of confirmed ray tracing games is still pretty small. There have been a couple of new, notable additions to the list in recent months, including Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 and Wolfenstein: Youngblood, but even now the number of games you can find it in right now> can be counted on a single hand. The same goes for Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech, which is still only available on the RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. So I thought I’d do the hard work for you and put everything in a nice, big list, detailing every confirmed ray tracing and DLSS game we know about so far.

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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.

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