Quake 2 RTX Patch 1.6.0 Brings HDR, FSR Support, and More

Quake 2 RTX, a remaster of a game released in 1997, received a major update today. Patch 1.6.0 brings new features, better performance, and several bug fixes.

Thanks to the efforts of Github user @res2k, you can now play Quake 2 with AMD FSR technology. Support for HDR Monitors is added, and you can now load and save your progress in expansion packs. Switching the VSync option will not reload the renderer anymore. Tone mapping is improved as well. Check out some of the patch details below.

• Re-designed the material definition system for flexibility and modding.
• Removed support for the VK_NV_ray_tracing Vulkan extension, which is superseded by
• VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline and VK_KHR_ray_query that were added earlier.

• Added a setting to enable nearest filtering on world textures, pt_nearest.
• Added support for converting sky surfaces into lights based on their flags, see pt_bsp_sky_lights.
• Added support for IQM models and skeletal animation for the RTX renderer.
• Added support for making any models translucent, and cl_gunalpha specifically.
• Added support for polygonal light extraction from MD2/MD3/IQM models.
• Added support for smooth normals on the world mesh through a BSPX extension.
• Enabled game builds for ARM64 processors.
• Extended the "shader balls" feature to support arbitrary test models with animation.

• Extended the supported light style range to 200% to fix over-bright lighting.
• Implemented anisotropic texture sampling for objects seen in reflections and refractions using ray cones.
• Improved CPU performance by not re-allocating the TLAS on every frame.
• Improved the handling of transparent effects in the acceleration structures.
• Removed the fake ambient that was added when global illumination is set to "off."
• Removed the initialization of the async compute queue, which was unused. This improves rendering performance and fixes some compatibility issues with AMD drivers.
• Replaced the material BRDF with a more physically correct one and removed the non-linear albedo correction function.
• Replaced the normal map normalization on load with a compute shader to speed up engine startup and map loading.

You can check out the complete patch notes via the official website.

So what do you think? Are you interested in any of these changes? Have you played any Quake games before? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.