Quake II RTX Performance Review

Thanks for the review and the tips for the various demo's to test with.

I missed the Quake train the first time around so it was interesting to play now and, in retrospect, see it's influence on so many games I played in the early 2000's.

Per reading your review I went ahead and cranked my case fans and 2080TI to full OC settings right off. It was holding mostly around 2100Mhz/14300Mhz. I haven't done the demo loops you guys did because I was limited for time this morning but I did play thru the first 2 levels for around an hour. At 4k it was averaging 23-27fps in these sections. I also set global to high and with V-sync on. Unfortunately updating the driver broke some of rivatuner(probably just need to reinstall) so I don't have any V-ram metrics to report but I am interested what might be going on there.

After killing whatever was needed I spent some time just walking around and taking in the visuals more. It really is beautiful. It was kind of confusing seeing the effect of the lighting, water, reflections, coupled with the older textures. Overall a really nice blend.

Many people are already stating how they'd love to see various similarly aged games get this treatment. I'd love to see the original AvP/Primal Hunt games get it. Seems like their lighting and environments would be awesome with this.
 
Thanks for the review and the tips for the various demo's to test with.

I missed the Quake train the first time around so it was interesting to play now and, in retrospect, see it's influence on so many games I played in the early 2000's.

Per reading your review I went ahead and cranked my case fans and 2080TI to full OC settings right off. It was holding mostly around 2100Mhz/14300Mhz. I haven't done the demo loops you guys did because I was limited for time this morning but I did play thru the first 2 levels for around an hour. At 4k it was averaging 23-27fps in these sections. I also set global to high and with V-sync on. Unfortunately updating the driver broke some of rivatuner(probably just need to reinstall) so I don't have any V-ram metrics to report but I am interested what might be going on there.

After killing whatever was needed I spent some time just walking around and taking in the visuals more. It really is beautiful. It was kind of confusing seeing the effect of the lighting, water, reflections, coupled with the older textures. Overall a really nice blend.

Many people are already stating how they'd love to see various similarly aged games get this treatment. I'd love to see the original AvP/Primal Hunt games get it. Seems like their lighting and environments would be awesome with this.

It would be sweet to see ray tracing added to the AvP2 game from back in the day.
 
I
We put Quake II RTX to the test to see how the 22 year old game performs with a fresh coat of raytracing. We put a RTX 2080Ti and GTX 1080Ti to the test to see how they stand up to the raytracing upgrade added on to the game. Discuss your thoughts on our findings below!

I noticed in the options menu a setting for using multi-gpu. Does anyone know if this applies to modern SLI and if so has NVidia put something in the drivers to allow DXR to work with SLI for this game?
 
I


I noticed in the options menu a setting for using multi-gpu. Does anyone know if this applies to modern SLI and if so has NVidia put something in the drivers to allow DXR to work with SLI for this game?

I ran it on my 1080 GTX SLI set up and it seemed to be using both cards. I clocked in around 7FPS at 5760x1200 before giving up and moving on to something else. Should try to toggle that and confirm the rate drops.
 
I ran it on my 1080 GTX SLI set up and it seemed to be using both cards. I clocked in around 7FPS at 5760x1200 before giving up and moving on to something else. Should try to toggle that and confirm the rate drops.

Good to know. My only rig that still has SLI is the GT80 laptop w/ a pair of slightly OC'd 980m's. At some point I'll install it there and test for laughs at 1080p.
 
Thanks for the review and the tips for the various demo's to test with.

I missed the Quake train the first time around so it was interesting to play now and, in retrospect, see it's influence on so many games I played in the early 2000's.

Per reading your review I went ahead and cranked my case fans and 2080TI to full OC settings right off. It was holding mostly around 2100Mhz/14300Mhz. I haven't done the demo loops you guys did because I was limited for time this morning but I did play thru the first 2 levels for around an hour. At 4k it was averaging 23-27fps in these sections. I also set global to high and with V-sync on. Unfortunately updating the driver broke some of rivatuner(probably just need to reinstall) so I don't have any V-ram metrics to report but I am interested what might be going on there.

After killing whatever was needed I spent some time just walking around and taking in the visuals more. It really is beautiful. It was kind of confusing seeing the effect of the lighting, water, reflections, coupled with the older textures. Overall a really nice blend.

Many people are already stating how they'd love to see various similarly aged games get this treatment. I'd love to see the original AvP/Primal Hunt games get it. Seems like their lighting and environments would be awesome with this.

It does show how bad the textures really were back then, so many repeated textures, and abrupt transitions
 
Some ironies here. Back then most games barely used 1 or 2 CDRs. So maybe 1 or upwards of 1.4GB total install. These days it's really common to see a minimum of 10-20GB and upwards of 60GB. This demo weighed in just under 1GB but with the new features it could still bring even the most expensive modern day rig to its knees in 4k and that's with those old textures
 
Quake 2 was a lot of fun that's for sure. I think it's a good and bad comparison for RTX though. Modern games use other lighting techniques to simulate many of the things RTX does so the difference isn't nearly as stark as Quake 2 makes it appear. Eg BF5 or Metro with RTX on or off isn't nearly as different. I don't know that either Metro or BF5 really uses RTX to it's potential though, I'm hoping we see some new titles that really impress.
 
Quake 2 was a lot of fun that's for sure. I think it's a good and bad comparison for RTX though. Modern games use other lighting techniques to simulate many of the things RTX does so the difference isn't nearly as stark as Quake 2 makes it appear. Eg BF5 or Metro with RTX on or off isn't nearly as different. I don't know that either Metro or BF5 really uses RTX to it's potential though, I'm hoping we see some new titles that really impress.


Nobtitles use RTX to it's potential- the hardware doesn't yet exist for a full realization. I would be surprised if we are even at 10% of it's potential
 
Downloaded full Quake II, installed Quake II RTX and can run the built in demo but so far I am unable to run either the Crusher or Massive1 demos. Created a demos folder in baseq2 and installed both crusher.dm2 and massive1.dm2. Followed the review guidelines which did not work nor the individual demo instructions. I just get in the console couldn't open demos/massive1.dm2 no file or directory exists.
  • Any ideas?
Now SLI does work with 1080 Ti's (EVGA 1080Ti SC Black) with good scaling of 1.7x - at 720p default RTX settings I get 60.3 fps. Single GPU I get 36.3fps
 
Last edited:
Great review, thank you!

This really drives home the point of how much of a burden RTX is on very expensive current gen hardware, and hopefully one or two generations in the future will really start to shine with full global illumination raytracing.
 
Become a Patron!
Back
Top