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Quake II RTX Now Runs on AMD GPUs Thanks to Vulkan Ray Tracing By Joel Hruska on December 15, 2020 at 2:15 pm
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Nvidia’s decision to rebuild Quake II as a ray tracing title was, in my opinion, a really clever way to show off what the feature was capable of, while simultaneously giving people a reason to return to the well-regarded classic title. Up until now, however, the only gamers who could enjoy it were folks who owned an Nvidia RTX GPU. While some games will run ray tracing on Pascal, Quake II RTX isn’t one of them.
Nvidia 460 89 WHQL driver lands with Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions support
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The ray-tracing ecosystem on PC is getting a big boost this week, as the Khronos Group has officially launched its Vulkan SDK with ray tracing support. GPU vendors have also begun shipping drivers to support the new API on both Nvidia and AMD based systems.
Khronos Group has been working on finalising its ray tracing extension for Vulkan over the last month. Back in November, significant progress was made with the announcement of the final specification. Now, the extension is fully ready to roll out and be utilised by developers in games.
Like DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Vulkan Ray Tracing is a GPU vendor agnostic API for ray tracing in games, meaning it will work across a wide range of GPUs. Previously, Nvidia developed its own version of the Vulkan ray tracing extension in order to ship games like Quake II RTX. With the API now finalised, Quake II RTX will actually run on AMD graphics cards too.
Vulkan API Is Officially Ray Tracing Ready With SDK, Tools, And Drivers Dec 15, 2020 09:00 EST
The Khronos Group has officially detailed that its Vulkan SDK, Tools, and Drivers are now Ray Tracing Ready. But didn t Vulkan already have Ray Tracing in it? I mean, Quake II RTX was running on Vulkan? Yes, that s true but it was running on an NVIDIA made extension in order for the game to have full support. The same thing goes for Wolfenstein: Youngblood, NVIDIA made an extension to support ray tracing in that title as well.
But, now, The Vulkan API has an official hardware-agnostic branch for ray tracing support. Khronos released the final extension in November 2020 so that developers could start integrating functionality alongside Vulkan s legacy rasterization framework. By doing so they ve allowed for Vulkan Ray Tracing to truly be the industry s first open, cross-platform, and cross-vendor solution for ray tracing acceleration.