Nvidia updated Quake II RTX to version 1.4.0 , introducing some improvements, in particular support for official Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions : this means that even the latest video cards from AMD can play this version of the game with ray tracing effects enabled .

Quake II RTX debuted in June last year, but until today the reproduction of the RT effects was based on the VKRay extensions designed by Nvidia itself, created to make up for a lack of official Vulkan extensions. Finally the Khronos Group consortium responsible for the development of open APIs has completed the development and all formal steps, introducing the official extensions for ray tracing in the API.

Nvidia therefore updated Quake II RTX to take advantage of the official extensions – opening consequently the title also the owners of Radeon RX 6000 – and published the new GeForce Game Ready drivers 460. 89 WHQL (downloadable from the Nvidia site or GeForce Experience) just to support the new features of the Vulkan API. Quake II RTX is on Steam, Nvidia’s website and GitHub. The game uses path tracing, that is, it applies ray tracing in real time on all the light effects present and not just on some.

“Bringing ray tracing to Vulkan is the fruit of a multi-year effort by many companies . Nvidia has assumed a leadership role at every stage its evolution, “commented the US company. “We were elected to chair the sub-group dedicated to the integration of ray tracing in Vulkan, contributing with our extension to the rapid progress of the working group. We have distributed drivers for the interim version of the Vulkan RT extensions in order to obtain the feedback. of developers and now we are the first to adopt these extensions in a game “.

“ Standardization of ray tracing in Vulkan is an important step to make the technology available on a wide range of devices, as well as allowing developers to use it to their advantage, ”said Andrej Zdravkovic, AMD’s senior vice president of software development. “We support all major features of this extension, including ray shading and ray queries via our driver. We are also working with developers to deliver exceptional performance by supporting hardware ray tracing on RDNA 2 architecture based video cards.”