After a multitude of Hardware related announcements at Computex 2019, Nvidia also had a lot to say on the RTX and Gaming side of things. First off, Wolfenstein: Youngblood – an upcoming FPS game dated for 26th July – will support ray tracing as well as NAS (Nvidia Adaptive Shading) for performance gains.
“Wolfenstein: Youngblood is an innovative take on the original franchise, which has a rich history of using forward-looking technologies to set its games apart. Bethesda’s use of ray tracing will dramatically enhance the image quality, while NVIDIA Adaptive Shading will boost performance.” – Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing, NVIDIA
“With Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a whole new generation of gamers could be getting their first exposure to the Wolfenstein franchise, and we want to make sure it blows them away. With NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPUs, we have access to technologies that deliver spectacular images and still maintain the performance necessary for flawless gameplay.” – Jim Kjellin, chief technology officer, MachineGames
Here ray tracing is implemented with the aid of Nvidia’s VKRay extension since the game uses Vulkan API. As a result of this partnership with Nvidia the game will be available for free on the purchase of a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, 2070 or 2060 equipped PC or laptop with select retailers across the globe.
The second announcement they made was that Quake II RTX will be downloadable for free starting June 6th. This free demo copy will only be having the first three campaign levels support ray tracing, for showcasing purposes. Owners of the game however will be able to play the entire game as well as multiplayer fully ray traced.
Here’s a list of improvements Nvidia claims to have made over the previous showcase:
- Improved Global Illumination rendering, with three selectable quality presets, including two-bounce GI
- Multiplayer support
- Time of day options that radically change the appearance of some levels
- New weapon models & textures
- New dynamic environments (Stroggos surface, and space)
- Better physically based atmospheric scattering, including settings for Stroggos sky
- Real-time reflectivity of the player and weapon model on water and glass surfaces, and player model shadows, for owners of the complete game (the original Shareware release does not include player models)
- Improved ray tracing denoising technology
- All 3,000+ original game textures have been updated with a mix of Q2XP mod-pack textures and our own enhancements
- Updated effects with new sprites and particle animations
- Dynamic lighting for items such as blinking lights, signs, switches, elevators and moving objects
- Caustics approximation to improve water lighting effects
- High-quality screenshot mode that makes your screenshots look even better
- Support for the old OpenGL renderer, enabling you to switch between RTX ON and RTX OFF
- Cylindrical projection mode for wide-angle field of view on widescreen displays
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