I agree that it looks bad. Personally, I think the additional effects ruin Quake II's dirty, dark atmosphere. This idea that just because it's "new" it makes it better is horribly flawed. But, I disagree that it would work better in Doom 3. Honestly off the top of my head, there's not a single game I can think that I think this kind of graphical overhaul would improve.
I have played Q2 since 1999 (I had my first PC back then) and I still like to replay it from time to time. With RT game looks different, but that's why I like it. It's interesting to see one of my favorite fps games in a new light, and to be honest I even prefer how game looks now.
They're actually started a thread taking suggestions on twitter on which game people would be interested next. https://twitter.com/XenthorXi/status/1137330717724200961
To each his own. Quake II is my favorite game in the series, but I prefer the original look. I also think most of the "source ports" ruin it by trying to add effects or update it. High res texture packs, model packs... changes to lighting... It's like playing Doom with zgDoom and having texture filtering turned on. Just looks terrible. The great thing about Quake II... you don't need any source port or program to run it. I have it currently installed, and that's from my original 1997 disc. Just a few little cfg tweaks for resolution and it runs great as is.
If you use the original skybox I think it retains most of the dark atmosphere. The problem I have with this is performance. If this demo proves anything, it's that ray tracing isn't really feasible yet. Unless they figure out a better to implement it...
I would love to see this tech in the classic Thief games but tuned to where you can hide correctly in all the dynamic shadows. Imagine where you can create shadows by moving boxes or something to create dark areas to hide instead of just relying on water arrows to destroy torch lights.. Stealth games could really benefit from this if done correctly imo. RTX like how it is used in Metro Exodus really make for a great immersive stealth experience so far. Quake 2 RTX is cool, but I can understand why some people don't care for it as much as it is a fast paced shooter. I think a slower paced immersive game might be able to benefit from it more overall. Imagine a game like System Shock 2 with all these RTX features..
You can max out the demo ray tracing feature and play at 60fps at 1440p, with the 2080-Ti, with dips at 40fps if you're constantly adjusting the sun in manual mode. I think what this demo shows is that current RTX GPU are under-equipped regarding RT core, to deliver satisfying performance at the resolution those GPUs are intended for. 2080-Ti being expected to be a 4K card for instance. 2070/2080 should deliver 60 at 1440p with raytracing maxed. 2060 60fps with raytracing maxed at 1080p. That's not the case right now. Also we need to keep in mind we're talking about 3 ray tracing features in this demo, all working together, soft shadows, reflections, and global illumination. To have all this working together at playable framerate at 1440p for the 2080-Ti, really disregard the comments that say ray tracing is a fantasy.
my favourite old school shooter *(and first pc game i ever upgrade for)* Requiem: Avenging Angel would have made a much better pick
So got to try this out and was the first time I got to see any RTX features first hand actually. Definitely impressive! Perhaps not as mind blowing as I hoped but probably due to the simplistic graphics / geometry otherwise. Also getting solid performance at 1080p with GI set to Low. 72 - 85 fps. GI Medium is between 50 - 60+. Interestingly though GI High doesn't run that much worse, from the bits I tested framerate dropped by maybe 5 fps compared to Medium (but tried only briefly). Using Low though for perf boost as it still looks very good. Btw anyone wanting a major perf boost plus overall tone closer to original, just turn GI off. You'll still get RT shadows etc. The image is quite blurry at res. scale 100 but I suppose that's caused by the denoising filter as this game uses RT for everything. Cool feature that you can turn denoising off to see how the source RT image looks like and to see the performance cost of denoising.