Last month, Nvidia announced Quake 3 Arena RTX, a modern ray-traced demo of the classic multiplayer shooter. Now a new version has been released, featuring an updated version of the Area 15 Nvidia Bunker map that was used as a GPU benchmark, starting with the GeForce 2 GTS in the year 2000.
Amazingly, Eurogamer's excited coverage of the original demo remains online more than a quarter of a century later, with former editor-in-chief John Bye detailing how the £249 180nm (!) GeForce 2 GTS with its 200MHz clocks and 32MB of 333MHz DDR memory were able to handle the complex graphics of the bunker. Even newer GPUs struggled to handle the map at extreme resolutions like 1600x1200 at very high settings, making the map a boon to early benchmarkers.
"The sheer attention to detail was incredible, with bolts holding objects to the walls, smoothly curved corridors, detailed staircases and bannister rails... even an Nvidia chip fabrication plant in one room churning out little Nvidia GPUs on a conveyor belt!"
The modern remake by modder WoodBoy is slightly more complex, with path-traced visuals, enhanced textures and materials, ray reconstruction and frame generation, amongst other technologies.
However, the star of the show is the new RTX Remix Advanced Particle VFX, the first iteration of which I saw in an Nvidia demo at Gamescom last year. This latest model was announced in March this year and allows for finer-grained control when replacing legacy particle effects with modern equivalents - including dynamic animations that allow the colour, size, speed and transparency of particles to ebb and flow over time, gravitational effects that let particles be repelled or attracted to in-game locations or carried in the wind, and randomisation that produces more organic-looking results.
Loading up the demo, it's clear to see the new systems in use around the black hole under teleporters and when firing the lightning gun.
The next major update for the Quake 3 Arena RTX demo isn't far away either, with more maps, materials, player models and weapons to arrive on April 28th. Until then, you can download the current 0.6 version on ModDB - just remember that you'll need files from a legitimate Quake 3 Arena installation to play.