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Quake II RTX Patch 1.6.0 Adds AMD FSR, HDR Support; DLSS Can’t Be Added

Vanta Aurelius

Vanta Aurelius

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Oct 27, 2017
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Wccftech said:
Last Friday, Quake II RTX received a big new patch, version 1.6. The developers added a bunch of new features, though the most interesting ones came directly from the community, as GitHub user @res2k introduced support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays.

The game now supports AMD FSR, but what about NVIDIA DLSS? Sadly, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, NVIDIA's prized Deep Learning Super Sampling cannot be added because of the GPL license used by Quake, as confirmed by developer AlexP on the Quake II RTX Steam forum.
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via Wccftech




It stinks that DLSS can't be added to the game due to GPL. Hopefully the DP4a path of XeSS ends up being really good, and is implemented into this. Projects like this continuing to get momentum will hopefully incentivize support for other ray-tracing inspired conversions of classic games. I'm still personally hoping for a Doom 3 ray-tracing conversion.

Edit: Now if someone could add the Nvidia Flow based particles and explosion effects back in to the game. It sucks that they got replaced with 2D billboards.
 
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NeoBob688

NeoBob688

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,635
I tried this and the game looks absolutely amazing. Like it is unbelievable for a slightly touched up version of a 25 year old game. Ray tracing for retro is where it's at.
 
cardboardboxer

cardboardboxer

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Oct 28, 2017
2,736
Kinda crazy how John Carmack pushed for the Quake games to be open sourced expecting that to give them a second life and yet it was that act that holds back Quake 2.
 

NoctisLC

Member
Jun 5, 2018
1,366
Its definitely worth a playthrough if you have rtx or a rx6000 series. Looks incredible even given its age.
 
OP
OP
Vanta Aurelius

Vanta Aurelius

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,893
ATL
cardboardboxer said:
Kinda crazy how John Carmack pushed for the Quake games to be open sourced expecting that to give them a second life and yet it was that act that holds back Quake 2.
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Held back? Could you elaborate? Completely redone textures and materials, full path tracing, and new effects is being held back?

If you're referring to not having DLSS, that stinks, but I'd definitely still trade that for getting a Quake RTX release in the first place. The majority of the ray-tracing projects for these older games started as, and most still are, open source projects. If Quake 2's source code wasn't open sourced, this project likely never would have happened in the first place.
 
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samred

samred

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Nov 4, 2017
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in extremely weird news, this update breaks all existing Q2RTX save files. the only consolation for affected users is that they can still access the existing 1.5.0 branch in the Steam "betas" tab. but, like, really?
 

Golden Darkness

Member
Oct 25, 2017
603
Is the GPL license somehow incompatible with calling DLSS functionality? Is it due to how DLSS is closed sourced or how DLSS is implemented in the game's code violates GPL?
 
copelandmaster

copelandmaster

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Oct 25, 2017
2,932
All that needs to be done is the FSR Yes/No option, correct? Nothing to do with the Fixed & Dynamic resolution options, or the Temporal AA or Temporal Upscaling options?

Messed around for a bit. This appears to work at 4k and 1080p, but the debug output says N/A for my typical resolution of 960x540.
 
samred

samred

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copelandmaster said:
All that needs to be done is the FSR Yes/No option, correct? Nothing to do with the Fixed & Dynamic resolution options, or the Temporal AA or Temporal Upscaling options?

Messed around for a bit. This appears to work at 4k and 1080p, but the debug output says N/A for my typical resolution of 960x540.
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That's the only FSR setting, yeah. It's unclear whether FSR is playing nice with the separate "dynamic resolution" option, in terms of understanding that the game is running at a lower res with a target higher resolution in mind.

Either way, brief testing suggests to me that Quake II RTX's aesthetic looks better with FSR disabled and leaning instead on the dumber dynamic resolution system that was already in place in 1.5.0.
 
collige

collige

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Oct 31, 2017
12,772
HDR support is sweet. I hope Nvidia eventually releases some kind of open source version of DLSS, but I'm not hopeful.

cardboardboxer said:
Kinda crazy how John Carmack pushed for the Quake games to be open sourced expecting that to give them a second life and yet it was that act that holds back Quake 2.
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Quake being open sourced is the reason that Quake II RTX exists in the first place. It started off as a research project.
 
chrominance

chrominance

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Oct 25, 2017
13,576
cardboardboxer said:
Kinda crazy how John Carmack pushed for the Quake games to be open sourced expecting that to give them a second life and yet it was that act that holds back Quake 2.
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Already discussed but yeah, this is a weird way to frame this given a) that Quake 2 has so many improvements decades later when a closed code base would just be mostly dead forever or else heavily modded to get a fraction of the same improvements, and that b) it's ultimately Nvidia keeping DLSS closed source that causes this issue.

More discussion of the GPL/DLSS stuff in the Github project.
 
Edward850

Edward850

Software & Netcode Engineer at Nightdive Studios
Verified
Apr 5, 2019
990
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samred said:
in extremely weird news, this update breaks all existing Q2RTX save files. the only consolation for affected users is that they can still access the existing 1.5.0 branch in the Steam "betas" tab. but, like, really?
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That's unavoidable for Quake, the save data is built around the expectation that the asset data never changes. So when it does, it gets very confused and starts mismatching data.
 
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