NVIDIA Shows Off Quake II Path-Traced Using Vulkan RTX/Ray-Tracing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Shows Off Quake II Path-Traced Using Vulkan RTX/Ray-Tracing

One of the demos NVIDIA is showing off this week at their GPU Technology Conference is Quake II being path-traced using a Vulkan port of the game and adapted to handle VK_NV_ray_tracing functionality paired with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Quake-2-PT

[DrYak]

{...} and does support Linux.

...provided that you run the specific distros (probably some Fedora and Ubuntu) that they target with their closed blobs.
If you have a rolling release because you want to have the most recent kernel, be ready to experience API breakage.
If you just want to have opensource software, you can go just cry in a corner until the Nouveau people manage to pull off another miracle of reverse engineering.

(also, I wonder how long until some enthusiasts manage to hack something similar with a card costing half the price, but from AMD)

[mcallegari]

...so, they have time to show off Quake 2 and no chance to sign binary blobs for re-clocking in Linux huh ?

[intelfx]

(also, I wonder how long until some enthusiasts manage to hack something similar with a card costing half the price, but from AMD)

Already happened (not enthusiasts, and not Quake, but still): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw

[muddymind]

That video is from the q2vkpt project and not Quake 2 RTX. They showed a brief video of the new one on the key note but it is yet to be made available.

[yokem55]

...provided that you run the specific distros (probably some Fedora and Ubuntu) that they target with their closed blobs.
If you have a rolling release because you want to have the most recent kernel, be ready to experience API breakage.
If you just want to have opensource software, you can go just cry in a corner until the Nouveau people manage to pull off another miracle of reverse engineering.

(also, I wonder how long until some enthusiasts manage to hack something similar with a card costing half the price, but from AMD)

I got q2vkpt up and running on my gentoo box just fine.

And as an aside, if you stick to a long-term stable kernel (4.19 for me), it isn't much of a maintenance hassle to rebuild the Nvidia kernel module each time you bump to the latest stable release.

Now keeping up with the latest non-longterm kernels can be harder and things break (I've seen reports of trouble with 5.0) but unless you really need the latest non-gpu related stuff in those newer kernels, they usually aren't worth it.

[arokh]

If you have a rolling release because you want to have the most recent kernel, you should also be capable of patching and recompiling the kernel module.

Fixed it for you.

[Raploz]

This is their real demo:

[chui2ch]

Fixed it for you.

What rolling release are you using that this is an issue on? As long as the distribution packages the driver I have never had an issue updating my kernel.

[ypnos]

If you have a rolling release because you want to have the most recent kernel, be ready to experience API breakage.

I have a rolling release and all I had to do was type `pacman -S nvidia` once.

If you just want to have opensource software, you can go just cry in a corner until the Nouveau people manage to pull off another miracle of reverse engineering.

Yes, and it is a shame.