Here you can download Quake II RTX, the legendary 1997 game with added real-time ray traced global illumination and reflections, dynamic direct and indirect lighting effects, mimicked physical material light reflection properties, and volumetric lighting effects.

id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing gamers a new single-player campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we played for years on pitifully-slow 56K modems, and a jaw-dropping engine that supported 3DFX GPU acceleration out of the box. Colored lighting, dynamic visual effects, and much more, all running at a glorious 640x480, or perhaps 800x600 if you had top-of-the-line hardware.

Fast forward to 2001, when id Software made the Quake II engine open source, enabling anyone to legally release total conversions with complete engine overhauls. Ever since, fans have beavered away on their own personal projects, the latest of which is Q2VKPT.

1.7.0 (April 18th, 2023)

Fixed Issues:

• Fixed a crash in the game logic when a monster interacts with a door in notarget mode (#92)
• Fixed a crash when the map file doesn't have a VIS hunk (#223)
• Fixed some Vulkan validation layer issues (#229, #246, more)
• Fixed texture alignment issues on some doors (#211)
• Fixed the flare gun still using ammo with dmflags including 8192 (DF_INFINITE_AMMO) (https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/issues/)191)
• Fixed Vulkan queue initialization on platforms that don't support split queues (#248)
• Switched the OpenAL dependency with a statically linked library (#224)

Misc Improvements:

• Added support for building on PowerPC 64 LE CPU architecture (#260)
• Adjusted the automatic UI scaling to avoid making the UI too big
• Improved precision of target frame rate adjustment (#242)
• Tuned the full-screen blend effects to be less intensive
• Updated the Loading plaque texture (#265)

Contributions by GitHub user @res2k:

• Added a warning when screen-space image memory usage is very high (#179)
• Added control over fallback radiance of emissive materials (#210)
• Added menu controls for the full screen blend effects (#216)
• Added support for spotlights with an emission profile and a player flashlight (#203, #214)
• Fixed a crash when some textures are missing (#263)
• Fixed an overflow condition when pt_bsp_sky_lights is more than 1 (#262)
• Fixed animated textures on BSP models (#187)
• Fixed crashes when renderer initialization fails (#199)
• Fixed FSR image scaling in some cases (#232)
• Fixed incorrect scaling of textures without a custom material definition (#235)
• Fixed mode setting on Linux in GitGub CI builds (#268)
• Fixed save game compatibility with Q2RTX 1.5.0 (#193)
• Fixed some issues with lighting in custom maps (#189)
• Fixed texture data size computation for R16_UNORM textures (#236)
• Fixed the HDR screenshot feature (#190)
• Fixed the look of smoke effects (#195)
• Fixed the range of animated light intensities (#200)
• Fixed the replacement textures when multiple materials are used with the same base texture (#222)
• Improved light list handling to fix excessive flicker and noise (#234)
• Improved material system robustness for games with custom textures (#201)
• Improved polygonal light sampling to reduce noise and darkening (#266)
• Improved Wayland support (#261, #221)
• Integrated several fixes from Q2PRO (#196)
• Replaced the single sky_clusters.txt file with per-map files (#219)
• Tweaked particles to have more nuanced colors (#197)
• Updated SDL2 to 2.26.1 (#252)

As Christoph states on his site, Q2VKPT is the basis for future research, and a platform for more ray tracing goodness. So, we reached out shortly after Q2VKPT’s release to ask if our own ray tracing experts, many of whom he worked with previously, could develop enhancements and major additions. He said yes, and this week NVIDIA is presenting the newly-created Quake II RTX together with Christoph at GDC 2019.
Running on a Vulkan renderer, with support for Linux, Quake II RTX is a pure ray-traced game. That means all lighting, reflections, shadows and VFX are ray-traced, with no traditional effects or techniques utilized.

“But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. A lot. We’ve introduced real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight and indirect illumination; refraction on water and glass; emissive, reflective and transparent surfaces; normal and roughness maps for added surface detail; particle and laser effects for weapons; procedural environment maps featuring mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed; a flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk; an improved denoiser; SLI support (hands-up if you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI back in the day); Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more!