Ray Tracing Makes The Old New Again

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NVIDIA has been doing some interesting things with Ray Tracing in newly released games, including some nice bundles.  Wolfenstein: Youngblood will be released on July 26th, giving you a choice between liberating Paris as one of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters in a continuation of the recent reboot of the ancient series.  The game will feature NVIDIA RTX accelerated ray tracing which will make it far more visually stimulating than Dad’s old rendering and to celebrate NVIDIA is offering the chance to get your hands on a copy.  The Born To Hunt bundle applies to any purchase of an RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, 2070 or 2060 GPU-equipped graphics card, desktop PC or laptop starting on May 28th, offering you the game for free until supplies run out.

Wolfenstein had a remake, but it is not the only old series being introduced to ray tracing.  Indeed, Quake II has had a recent face lift and if you happen to have an RTX card then you can replay the game in a way you would have never conceived of back in 1997.  As you can see above, the addition of ray tracing to the game has completely changed the way it looks.  This is certainly not the first time we have seen such a thing, back in 2006 Daniel Pohl talked with us and showed off a ray traced version of Quake 3 and 4, though the hardware at the time proved to be insufficient for the job.

It would certainly make John Carmack proud, he discussed his hopes for ray tracing with Ryan over a decade ago at QuakeCon.  As of June 6th, you will be able to grab the first three levels of Quake II, redone and retraced from NVIDIA for absolutely free.  If you still have your old installation CDs, or you grab the game from Steam you can play the entire game, on a GeForce RTX 2060 or better.  You can see the release video here, and it is the place to keep an eye on in June when it arrives.