Aftershock!

How Quake II absolutely crushed my new 3080

  Pirate Press         June 2021

Since getting my 3080 graphics card in late December, I've been somewhat isolated from the hysteria surrounding the worldwide lack of video cards. But just because I've been blissfully ignorant doesn't mean that the problem hasn't gotten worse. 

Although Nvidia has vehemently denied that they are having production issues, several sources including computer manufacturer Asus, have come forward to admit that both low GPU yields as well as ABF substrate shortages are the real reason none can be found. Speculation is that it could still be another year before stock is restored to pre-pandemic levels. A co-worker recently discovered this when he signed up for a Zotac 3080 waiting list and was informed that there were 21,000 customers in front of him. 

Compounding problems is Bitcoin's insane surge over the past six-months, leading many new users to try and mine the cryptocurrency themselves. That has also generated demand for the graphics cards even as Nvidia has taken steps to restrict it. Their new 3060 has a hash-rate limiter for mining, and future cards are reported to be similarly handicapped as well. Due to that financial fluke, the equity in my 3080 has nearly doubled again as examples are now trading for upwards of $2,500 on Ebay and Amazon. And while it's tempting to turn a tidy $2000 profit, my 3080 is worth much more to me than that.

So, it feels a little disingenuous when acquaintances realize I have a 3080 and then suddenly pepper me with questions about which stunning new game I'm playing and how great it must look with everything maxxed out. That's when I have to sheepishly admit that I've been playing a three-level demo from a game that's a quarter-century old. 

In short order, I see the wave of shock roll over their face and hear the enthusiasm drop out of their voice. Sometimes it's even accompanied by uncomfortable fidgeting. I know they're wondering why I spent all that money and time just to play a game that originally ran on Windows 95. They're thinking it's a complete waste— just like buying a Ferrari and not driving it, which I'm similarly guilty of.

I try to reassure them that Quake II RTX boasts cutting-edge technology more advanced than any new PC game, but I can tell they don't believe me, and by then it's already too late to salvage the conversation.

The first Quake II demo originally came out in the fall of 1997 and I can vividly recall downloading it. That's because on my rural dial-up connection it took an agonizing THREE HOURS to download 11 MB! Heck, the fastest speed I could get on our antiquated phone lines was 19.9K, not even enough to max out my 28.8 modem! I remember wistfully praying after Hurricane Georges crippled our phone service that maybe—just maybe—new lines would provide better speeds. Of course, they didn't, but by that time I was accustomed to the constant disappointment. In fact, that childhood trauma still haunts me to this day, and it's the main reason I made sure that before we built our new house that it would have high-speed internet access. But even now, a recent survey shows that just 28% of my county has access to broadband speeds of 25 Mbps or more. Unbelievably, I have Sparklight's 1 gigabit connection and I'm paying less for it than my old 6 Mbps AT&T DSL!   

Having purchased my first x86 computer just six-months earlier (a Packard Bell Pentium 200 MMX), Quake II became the first new blockbuster game I played on it. It also remains my favorite of the franchise as it was improved over the original Quake, and not multiplayer-focused like Quake III. The succeeding Quake 4 and Quake Wars were so far removed from the original concept that they were barely recognizable. Ironically, I was so proud of myself for future-proofing my PC by paying the extra $150 to double the memory from 4MB to 8MB only to discover that Quake II needed 16MB to run smoothly. It was the first—but certainly not the last—bitter pill I'd have to contend with when building my own personal computers. In fact, that upgrade anxiety has been one of the few constants in my life for nearly the past thirty years.

For lack of a better term, Quake II RTX is a computer resto-mod: a classic game overhauled with the latest cutting-edge technology. And what makes it so demanding isn't just the inclusion of Ray Tracing, but rather Path Tracing. Path Tracing is so computationally intensive that no current game uses it, instead they all employ a hybrid rendering model of standard rasterization and Ray Tracing— Battlefield V uses Ray Traced Reflections, Metro Exodus uses Ray Traced Global Illumination, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses Ray Traced Shadows. This compromise is necessary to ensure lifelike imagery while still maintaining acceptable frame rates.

Ray Tracing was first theorized in 1968 and satisfied the need for simulating how a ray of light interacts with an object. In 1986, physicists developed Path Tracing as a way to essentially light an entire computer generated room. Naturally, the burgeoning technology was favored in animated movies by companies such as Pixar who used it for their smash hits like Cars and Monsters University. The Ray Tracing process was so intensive that a single frame in Monsters University could take up to 29 hours to develop from an army of computers each equipped with 96GB of RAM. In comparison, my new PC only has 32GB of RAM, and it's presently overkill for everything I do.       

But given the insanity of the past twelve months, it's no longer shocking that a 25 year-old demo was resurrected to be even more punishing now than it was originally on my Pentium 200 with 8 MB of RAM.

It starts with the familiar Quake II splash screen and uses the same cumbersome controls I remember from 1997. Perhaps for nostalgia's sake, Nvidia declined to change anything other than the actual in-game environments and that leaves a somewhat perplexing mix of old and new.      

The Path Traced rooms are stunning, with vivid colors and lighting replacing the murky browns and greens that saturated the original version. 

 

 

 

 

But the actual game play and dated audio files still make it feel like a relic. Similarly, the low-count polygon models are also a jarring reminder of the demo's humble beginnings.

Thankfully, the commands to run the benchmark were retained so it was fairly easy to enable it and see how demanding the Path Tracing truly is. At 3840x2160, I recorded 39.4 FPS, which is a good bit below the 60 FPS recognized as an optimal refresh rate for gaming. But considering I spent $200 on a 4MB Diamond Monster 3D graphics card to play the demo at just 512x384 in 1997, this still feels like a victory today.

Despite that, I can't recommend buying a 3080 to play what is essentially an updated 25 year-old demo. However, the dichotomy of Quake II RTX is that it's a game from the past showing us what a game from the future looks like.

If the exponential hardware improvements continue like they did from 1997-2021, in 2046 I'll be running benchmarks on a 24K monitor with a 25 TB video card.

And I'll probably only still be getting 30 FPS!

😂

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