It’s entirely possible that the reason the company isn’t enabling ray tracing support in its lower end products is that it can’t guarantee a high-quality experience.
It would be nice to see AMD offer Vulkan support for RX 57 XT cards, but keep in mind, the 6800 XT and 6800 lag Nvidia’s ray tracing performance already. Even if you turn down other detail levels enough to get the feature running, you may not feel ray tracing makes up for the losses in other places. In practice, most of the Pascal cards other than the 1080 Ti and maybe the GTX 1080 have often proven too slow to run ray tracing effectively. On paper, Nvidia supports a huge range of cards. One thing we know is that the performance impact of enabling ray tracing is heavy, especially on GPUs that weren’t designed to support it.
#Quake 2 rtx update#
So far, we haven’t heard much about whether or not RTX-enabled games will receive an update to allow AMD to use ray tracing, or how much additional optimization is required to make use of the feature on RDNA2 GPUs as opposed to Turing / Ampere.įor now, it doesn’t look as though AMD has any plans to enable ray tracing on the 5700 or 5700 XT. Quake 2 has been used as a test for all kinds of graphical technologies, going back to stencil shadows in the 2000s. In theory, developers that already have a Vulkan and a DX12 path could keep Nvidia RTX support for one API and support both Nvidia and AMD in Vulkan. Quake 2 RTX was not designed to remaster Quake 2, but rather as a playable proof of concept for RTX path tracing technology. This kind of ‘coopetition’, if you will, is a key part of ensuring standards are widely supported and making certain gamers can expect certain features on a wide range of systems.
Nvidias remastered Quake II RTX is the first fully path-traced video game, and you can have it for free. In other words, Nvidia’s open source work is a key part of why AMD GPUs can now run Quake II RTX. Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 7 64-bit Processor: Intel i3-3220 or AMD Equivalent Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce. Read this exciting story from PCWorld July 2019.