The versions of classic games generated through Ray Tracing in its entirety are a good way to show the benefits of this technology. These are not simple patches on existing games, but completely redone versions in which from the first to the last pixel are not generated at any time through rasterization. (aaplumbingsa.com) Well, after seeing things like Quake 2, Minecraft and Portal, now it’s your turn to the first Quake with Ray Tracing and the announcement to a version of Half-Life.
Ray Tracing in modern games is used to solve a series of problems that the traditional method cannot do due to its limitations. These have to do with the representation of light in a three-dimensional space and that is that the traditional way of displaying 3D games that has been used for more than decades cannot represent well the effects of indirect lighting, that is, the one that It is generated when a light source falls on them. Which means that when creating reflections and shadows they are totally inaccurate.
Ray Traced Quake
The source code of Id Software’s first polygonal game has been publicly available for a long time, since John Carmack himself published it under the GPL license, where you can see all the game’s source code and we have all the freedom to modify and redistribute it. This has allowed a simple user named Sultim Tsyrendashiev create a version of Quake with Ray Tracing and announce their plans to do so with the first half lifewhich we remember uses the same graphics engine.
The game has had to be completely reprogrammed under Vulkan, but you only have to watch the video to see the change in lighting of this classic and see how its entire visual presentation changes. Which shows what ray tracing can do in games. In case you are interested in playing Quake with Ray Tracing, you just have to access the GitHub of the project where you will find the instructions to install it and play it totally free. It is also compatible with NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 technology, something that we miss in Quake 2 RTX. In any case, you will not only need an RTX graphics card of the green mark to enjoy the game, one of the RX 6000 series with AMD is also good perfectly for playing this visually revamped classic.
Why aren’t there more ray traced classics?
In any case, we must remember that Quake was a first batch 3D game that used lighting with one bounce of light and not two, as happened later from the first Unreal, a feature that all games released since 1998 have retained. hereafter for computer. So most classic games to be ported to Ray Tracing may lose their artistic and visual identity in the process. Hence why studios are so reluctant to remake their historical games using this technique.
In order for you to understand it better, since indirect lighting cannot be represented well, simulations are made from the artistic section or simply maps of static lights and shadows. This means that if many games were to change their simulated indirect lighting to something much more mathematically precise like Ray Tracing, then the resulting images would not look exactly the same as the original, because of it. So behind it there is a much bigger job and it means that in the future we can see games with the Ray Tracing remaster tagline.
