After Quake 2, Return to Castle also gets Wolfenstein path tracing.
21 years after its release, the shooter Return to Castle Wolfenstein gets a massive graphics upgrade. Wolf PT is the latest project from Senior Graphics R&D Engineer at AMD Dihara Wijetunga. That PT
stands for path tracing. Although Wolf PT is not yet accessible, we can already marvel at comparison shots:
The picture on the right looks much more realistic.
What do we see in the pictures?
The comparison image on the right shows much more realistic lighting and shading than the original on the left. The moonlight combined with the diffused glow of the torches throws shadows in different directions, at the same time the corridor appears darker. This is made possible by the so-called path tracing. More comparison pictures can be found below in the text in the gallery.
What is RTX?
The most important terms related to ray tracing explained
What is path tracing?
To put it very simply, path tracing is ray tracing on steroids. With ray tracing, rays are sent into a scene from the virtual viewer. As soon as these hit a solid object, further rays are sent in the direction of each light source in the scene. Then follows the calculation of intensity, reflections, and so on. If objects are transparent, the rays penetrate them and are tracked until they hit an opaque surface.
With path tracing, many hundreds or even thousands of rays are sent into the scene to calculate each pixel. In contrast to ray tracing, however, the light rays are spread across the entire Away
followed through the scene no matter how many times they reflect. The computing effort of path tracing is accordingly much greater than that of ray tracing.
Picture gallery:
Wolf PT – View screenshots
Release in Europey unclear
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is still indexed in Europey, so it’s unclear if Wolf PT will ever be officially released in Europey. However, there is definitely a possibility that something will change here, since the Wolfenstein rights are now held by Bethesda, which has already obtained de-indexing for Quake 2.
Memories of Quake II RTX
Quake 2 is also a shooter that has been enhanced with path tracing. You can download Quake II RTX for free on Steam. You can read how good this looks in the following article:
21 year old classic
First game entirely in real-time raytracing
What do you think of the comparison pictures? Do they make you want to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein? And do you use a graphics card with the appropriate cores for ray tracing or is that a superfluous gimmick for you? Write us that in the comments!
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