JULY 2019 PCWorld 25you want to test, then follow this key
sequence:
- Press the tilde key (~), typically at the
top left corner (under the function-key row) on
standard QWERTY keyboards. - Type timedemo 1
- Type demo demo1
Those commands work in the Quake RTX
version (which was built off of work [go.
pcworld.com/crto] by Christoph Schied for
his Q2VKPT project).
If you just want to see how your copy of
Quake II runs today, you may have to type this
instead: - timedemo 1
- demomap demo1.dm2
For an alternative demo map, type
demomap demo2.dm2 instead.
Quake II will now run the short scene.
Pressing the tilde key (~) again will show an
average frame rate from the run.
Update: In the final demo released by
Nvidia, the demo map seems to have been
jettisoned, but you can still run the pre-
canned benchmark by typing: - timedemo 1
- demomap q2demo1.dm2
SO HOW FAST IS IT?
On a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with a not-quite-
final version of Quake II RTX, we saw roughly
97 fps at a resolution of 1920 x 1080, with
visual quality set to high. For comparison, we
saw about 419 fps in Quake II, set to
1920x1080 with 8x anisotropic filtering
and multisampling turned off, using the
OpenGL 3.2 renderer on a Core i7-9750H
laptop with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU.
We had to patch the Steam version first using
the Yamagi patch.
If you’re underwhelmed by 97 fps on a
$1,200 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card, remember
what’s going on here. The game is
implementing a fully path-traced renderer and
is computationally expensive to run. It’s a
technique that’s really only been used in 3D
movies to date, and fairly recently, too.
It also yields some beautiful effects. Glass
windows and water in Quake II RTX obviously
seem like night and day from the original
version. So if you’re going to snark about
“only 97 fps” on a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti,
know that a game session of Quake II RTX
will easily render more ray-traced frames than
a full-length animated movie, and in real
time, too.
If you’re planning on running Quake II RTX,
you’ll probably want to pair it with the Game
Ready GeForce drivers too (available at
go.pcworld.com/drvr).IT’S LIKE 1997 ALL OVER
AGAIN!
So rather than use this as an opportunity to
create yet another hot take on the state of ray
tracing in today’s games and hardware,
instead wind the clock back 22 years and
crank up this gem of a game.