Nvidia Giving Away Graphically Boosted and Remade Quake II

NVIDIA today announced that Quake II RTX will be available on GeForce.com as a free download on June 6.

Quake II RTX is the world’s first game that is fully path-traced, a ray-tracing technique that unifies all lighting effects such as shadows, reflections, refractions and more into a single ray-tracing algorithm. The result is a stunning new look for id Software’s Quake II, one of the world’s most popular games, originally launched in 1997.

Quake II RTX includes the first three single-player levels of the beloved PC gaming classic. Gamers that already own Quake II can experience the whole game in its entirety, including multiplayer deathmatch and cooperative multiplayer modes, all fully path traced.

“Quake II RTX is an expression of our love and passion for PC gaming,” said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “By applying next-generation ray-traced graphics technologies and using the Vulkan API, we are able to share this PC classic with a new generation of gamers who can download and play it for free.”

“It’s rare that a PC game has the impact and longevity of Quake II, and seeing it reimagined with ray tracing 20 years later is something special for me,” said Tim Willits, studio director of id Software and one of the creators of the original Quake franchise. “Equally special is the relationship with NVIDIA, whom we have worked with since the early days of first-person shooters. Seeing how NVIDIA integrated modern features into this classic game is really exciting.”

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