The “PT” in its name stands for Path Tracing, a compute-intensive ray tracing technique that unifies all lighting effects (shadows, reflections, et cetera) into a single ‘pure ray tracing algorithm’. student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Released in January, Q2VKPT was created by former NVIDIA intern Christoph Schied, a Ph.D. Ever since, fans have beavered away on their own personal projects, the latest of which is Q2VKPT.
Colored lighting, dynamic visual effects, and much more, all running at a glorious 640x480, or perhaps 800圆00 if you had top-of-the-line hardware.įast forward to 2001, when id Software made the Quake II engine open source, enabling anyone to legally release total conversions with complete engine overhauls. Id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing gamers a new single-player campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we played for years on pitifully-slow 56K modems, and a jaw-dropping engine that supported 3DFX GPU acceleration out of the box.
