Remastering classics

Quake II RTX won’t be the last game to be
remastered with an NVIDIA ray tracing upgrade.

DSOGaming^[1] has discovered, NVIDIA
is hiring^[2] a
producer for its Lightspeed Studios unit who will be in charge of a
“game remastering program” that will add RTX ray tracing to more
old well-known titles.

RELATED: CES 2019: NVIDIA WILL BE
BRINGING ITS GEFORCE RTX SERIES TO LAPTOPS THIS
JANUARY^[3]

Remastering classics

The job listing^[4], found by DSO
Gaming, said the following:

“We’re cherry-picking some of the greatest titles from the
past decades and bringing them into the ray tracing age. Thus,
we’ll be giving them state-of-the-art visuals while keeping the
gameplay that made them great.”

“The NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios team is picking up the
challenge starting with a title that you know and love but we can’t
talk about here.”

The GPU manufacturer is remaining tight-lipped about which games
will be remastered, though the listing says the next project is a
game “you know and love.” A vague clue if ever there was one.

GeForce RTX ray tracing

As Engadget^[5] points out,
Lightspeed worked on the Quake II RTX remaster and has also
been responsible for bringing various games to Android through
Nvidia’s Shield devices. These include Half-Life 2, as well as a
port of Super Mario Galaxy,  made only for the Chinese
market.

By creating more ray tracing remasters Nvidia will also be able
to sell more GeForce RTX graphics
cards without needing third-party developers to
create new games that utilize the technology.

Nvidia  RTX Ray Tracing is a graphics technique^[6]
that models light in real-time that interacts in a realistic
fashion with the virtual environment.

For example, shadows and reflections of objects that are
off-screen are still rendered on objects within the field of vision
inside the game world. The technique allows games to render in a
more realistic CGI-style.