24 PCWorld JULY 2019NEWS QUAKE II RTX ON A GEFORCE RTX 2080 TI CARD
combine it with
traditional raster
techniques.
Nvidia’s Quake II RTX
remaster, however, renders
everything (go.pcworld.
com/rndr) by physically
tracing light rays to create
the scene. Such an
undertaking with a modern
game’s complexity isn’t
possible, but 1997’s Quake
II puts it within reach.
Nvidia gave us a chance to play with a
near-release version of Quake II RTX during
Computex, so we decided to see how close
in fidelity the RTX version was.MEMORIES: GOING WAY,
WAY BACK TO QUAKE II
When we talk about Quake II, we’re talking
old-school PC gaming, and old-school
graphics. In 1997, Matrox was still in the
game, AMD hadn’t yet bought ATI, and even
Nvidia’s GeForce didn’t exist yet (its card at
the time was the Riva 128). In fact, dozens of
graphics (go.pcworld.com/dozn) companies
were still competing at the time.
As if to prove how the world is on a time
loop, everyone was quaking in their boots in
fear of Intel’s upcoming discrete graphics
card, the i740 using the AGP interface. The
conventional wisdom among investors,
technology analysts, and press was that Intelcould do no wrong and would soon take over
the discrete graphics market.
In 1997, though, PC gamers all wanted
3Dfx’s Voodoo card (the Voodoo2 card
would come out a year after Quake II).HOW TO BENCHMARK
QUAKE II RTX THE 1997 WAY
Only old-timers likely remember that Quake II
had a built-in benchmark, which quickly
became the gaming benchmark to measure
graphics cards (the term GPU hadn’t been
coined yet). What’s cool is Nvidia’s
remastering of Quake II includes the original
timedemo from 1997.
To run it, install the game demo from
Nvidia’s website (go.pcworld.com/q2dm).
The free version includes three levels but
should be capable of running the Quake II
built-in benchmark. Configure the game for
the resolution and graphics quality settingsHere’s how you run a benchmark in Quake II RTX the way we did it in 1997.