Quake II RTX has support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution with a new patch

In December 2020, the Quake II RTX shooter received support for the cross-platform Vulkan API, allowing it to run on AMD graphics cards. And today a patch 1.6, which extends support for AMD graphics, was released.

A key new feature of Quake II RTX 1.6 is support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution scaling technology, despite the fact that the project is handled by NVIDIA. The release also includes support for HDR displays, improved performance when working with highly detailed static models, faster launching of the game and loading of maps, as well as other innovations. The Quake II RTX version is based on the Q2VKPT project, developed by Christoph Schied of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & ; he's also a former NVIDIA intern. The game runs on OS no lower than Windows 7 (x64) or Ubuntu 16.04. The original Quake II game developed by id Software company back in 2001 made the engine completely open, and the source code itself and the updated version of the shooter can be downloaded from the project page on GitHub. Also Quake II RTX is available on Steam.

Quake II RTX ray tracing now available on AMD graphics cards thanks to Vulkan

Quake II RTX was one of the first demonstrations of hardware ray tracing capabilities on NVIDIA Turing graphics cards. The game calculated lighting and shadow effects using path tracing methods. Now, with updates to the Vulkan API, these effects are available on any GPU with the necessary performance.

Quake II RTX version 1.4.0 was released today, and among the improvements the patch brings to the classic shooter & ; support for platform-independent Vulkan extensions for hardware ray tracing. In fact, this means that if you have an AMD Radeon graphics card installed in your PC, you can play Quake II RTX with all the newfangled lighting effects from today on it. Not bad news for vintage fans. However, Quake II RTX is developed by NVIDIA, so it's possible that Quake II RTX will not be too friendly to Radeon. NVIDIA itself has already presented a fresh driver with ray tracing support in Vulkan API in Quake II RTX game. But that's not all & ; now that the open API Vulkan supports hardware ray tracing, the new lighting technology in games can be used on any platform, while in the past the only option was Microsoft DirectX 12, that is, it was only for Windows. Updated version Vulkan Software Development Kit includes all the tools necessary for developers to implement ray tracing in their projects on virtually any platform, which means that soon it should appear in more games. You can download the conditionally free version of Quake II RTX from Steam, Github, or the NVIDIA website.