Raytracing updates for classic games – That’s what the PCGH editors say about it

The “Internal editorial” format gives you an insight into the editorial team far away from a webcam, magazine column or videos. Each PCGH editor gives their personal commentary on a topical issue here. We not only cover the whole world of PC hardware, but also games including current console titles, films and technology in general – which influences our daily life in a variety of ways. Redaktion Intern appears regularly at the weekend. The topic this time:

Ray tracing updates for classic games…

Background: Raytracing updates

Calendar weeks 16 and 17 of 2022 were marked by boredom – at least as far as our favorite hobby is concerned. If there are no novelties, one devotes oneself either to the game stack of shame or to cherished evergreens. Hard-working hobby programmers thought the same thing, which is why another ray tracing update for a very old game was recently released: the first-person shooter Doom from 1993 can be enjoyed with full-screen ray tracing thanks to the PrBoom RT modification, as we Run Doom Ray Traced test. This is not the programmer’s first ray tracing experiment, but it is the most impressive so far. Previously, he already refined ports of Half Life and Serious Sam: The First Encounter with sparkling ray-traced splendor. However, the most prominent “victim” of extensive modernization is likely to be Quake 2 RTX, which was promoted by Nvidia. In addition, other projects are haunting the Internet with the aim of taking gems of the nineties to a new level using modern ray tracing, including console milestones such as Super Mario 64 (Ray Traced). The sense and nonsense of these projects can be argued admirably. What the PCGH editors think of Glide patches … sorry, ray tracing updates, read bluntly in the picture gallery.