It is a historic day for Vulkan gaming, as NVIDIA has posted a new Game Ready Driver that officially supports Vulkan Ray Tracing. We have also updated the Quake II RTX game demo to support the new industry standard.
Bringing ray tracing into Vulkan has been a multi-year effort by many companies and NVIDIA has taken an active leadership position in each stage of its evolution. We were elected to chair the Vulkan ray tracing subgroup at Khronos, we contributed the design of our vendor extension to Khronos to help the Vulkan working group make rapid progress, and we shipped drivers for the provisional version of the Vulkan ray tracing extension to enable developer feedback for the subgroup. Now we are the first to adopt those extensions in a game.
Quake II RTX: Ray Tracing for Everyone!
Vulkan Ray Tracing is not just for GeForce RTX anymore. Enter Quake II RTX and its new update. By being the first game to support the recently released, platform-agnostic Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, Quake II RTX should play on any compatible GPU. Quake II RTX no longer relies on vendor-specific extensions and should play on any compatible GPU. Go here for more information.
Quake II RTX was 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 one of the world’s most popular games, originally launched in 1997.
Grab the New Game Ready Driver, Test Vulkan Ray Tracing!
Quake II RTX also has a built-in benchmark so you can see how different GPUs stack-up for ray tracing–the world’s first benchmark for Vulkan Ray Tracing.
To check it out, grab our latest Game Ready Driver and download Quake II RTX from Steam. The first three levels are still free. And the whole game gets the ray tracing treatment if you own it.
Related Links:
- GeForce.com story about the new Game Ready Driver: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-2-rtx-vulkan-ray-tracing-game-ready-driver
- Vulkan Production Driver Details on developer.nvidia.com: https://news.developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-ray-tracing-production-drivers-and-quake-ii-rtx-cross-vendor-extensions/
- NVIDIA Driver Downloads: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx
- Quake II RTX on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1089130/
- Vulkan SDK, Tools and Drivers are Ray Tracing Ready: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/vulkan-sdk-tools-and-drivers-are-ray-tracing-ready
