Nvidia’s decision to rebuild Quake II as a ray tracing title was, in my opinion, a really clever way to show what the feature was capable of, while at the same time giving people a reason to return to the well-known classic title . However, until now, the only gamers who could enjoy it were folks who owned an Nvidia RTX GPU. While some games run ray tracing on Pascal, Quake II RTX isn’t one of them.
Now, however, AMD fans also have the option to enjoy Quake II RTX, apparently with the explicit help of Nvidia. Any GPU that supports the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions maintained and developed by the Khronos Group can also run Quake II RTX. On the AMD side, that support seems to be limited to the RX 6000 series, at least for now.
Nvidia’s support is much broader. In addition to Ampere and Turing, Vulkan Ray Tracing is also supported on the GTX 1660 family of GPUs, the Volta-based Nvidia Titan V and the Quadro GV100, and on Pascal GPUs with at least 6 GB RAM. If you haven’t seen the Quake II RTX launch trailer yet, we’ve embedded it below.
Nvidia has done some of the heavy lifting to bring ray tracing to Vulkan in the first place. There are already existing tools to help translate DX12 calls and High Level Shader Language (HLSL) code to Vulkan and SPIR-V, respectively. Nvidia’s specific contribution to the project was to add ray tracing support to Microsoft’s open source DirectXCompiler, which is often used to port HLSL code to Vulkan.
In other words, Nvidia’s open source work is an important part of why AMD GPUs can now run Quake II RTX. This kind of ‘coopetition’, if you will, is an important part of ensuring that standards are widely supported and that certain gamers can expect certain features on a wide variety of systems. In theory, developers who already have a Vulkan and DX12 path could keep Nvidia RTX support for a single API and support both Nvidia and AMD in Vulkan. So far, we haven’t heard much about whether or not RTX-compatible games will receive an update to allow AMD to use ray tracing, or how much additional optimization is needed to take advantage of the feature on RDNA2 GPUs unlike Turing / Ampere.
For now, it doesn’t look like AMD has any plans to enable ray tracing on the 5700 or 5700 XT. One thing we know is that the performance impact of enabling ray tracing is big, especially on GPUs that aren’t designed to support it. On paper, Nvidia supports a huge range of cards. In practice, most Pascal cards other than the 1080 Ti and could be the GTX 1080 has often proved too slow to perform ray tracing effectively. Even if you lower other levels of detail enough for the feature to work, you may not feel like ray tracing is making up for losses in other places.
It would be nice to see AMD have Vulkan support for RX 5700 and 5700 XT cards, but keep in mind that the 6800 XT and 6800 are already slowing down Nvidia’s ray tracing performance. It’s very possible that the reason the company doesn’t support ray tracing in its lower-end products is that it can’t guarantee a high-quality experience.
Anyway, if you want to check out Quake II ray traced you can download AMD’s beta drivers with Vulkan RT support here, while Nvidia’s beta driver with the same can be downloaded here. As far as I know, the only title that uses Vulkan Ray Tracing is Quake II RTX for now, but Khronos has designed the standard for use on computers and mobile devices and is hoping for a long-term robust recording.
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