Quake II RTX: the classic's first three levels, remade in ray-traced light

What GOG hands you is smaller than your memory of the original: the rest of the campaign and the multiplayer are missing, locked away in a separate paid release called Quad Damage.

A technical showcase, not the whole campaign

You have just touched down on an alien surface, and only a handful of your comrades are left. Ahead of you, heavily guarded military compounds hide the command center still holding up the enemy city's defenses — taking it down is the only way to learn whether humanity has any chance left.

This scene doesn't come straight from the studio behind the original game: it came from elsewhere. Lightspeed Studios is credited with this version, distributed by NVIDIA and built on the work Christoph Schied and his team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology did in adding ray tracing to Quake II — the project they named Q2VKPT, put together on top of the Q2PRO codebase. NVIDIA took it further: it added the most complete variant of the technique, redid textures and tweaked dozens of other details.

What this version actually includes, though, is only a sliver: the same first three levels that the original shareware release shipped with. To play through the rest of the campaign or join someone in multiplayer, you have to buy Quake II: Quad Damage separately. The store page itself files the package under three genres — shooter, first-person and horror — and dates this edition's arrival to August 19, 2021.

The praise reads like an engineer's, not a nostalgic's

The praise that comes up most often isn't about the story: it's about your graphics card. One writer, back in September 2021, warns that he isn't even a fan of the original Quake II, yet confirms that this version also runs on AMD cards, using Vulkan's ray tracing — and points out that the store page, geared toward NVIDIA hardware, says nothing about it. Years later, in January 2024, another account asks for the very thing the store still hasn't delivered: a Linux version, given that running the game the long way around, through a compatibility layer, already works fine. It's the kind of detail you only stumble onto by trying to install it on a card the page never accounted for.

When it comes to the picture on screen, one writer in August 2021 explains how to balance dynamic resolution scaling alongside DLSS until performance holds steady on cards considered too weak for the fuller kind of ray tracing the game leans on — the kind that follows light all the way back to its source rather than merely faking reflections. A shorter, German-language note sums up the appeal another way: a quick match, no-fuss action, perfect for filling a spare moment. But the same person who praised the blend of the old modeling with today's light and shadow, in November of that year, is also the one who warns that the game freezes when you save or load — the price you pay for the showcase.

The most upvoted complaint isn't about the game, it's about the package

The review the most people flagged as helpful, posted in August 2022, doesn't go after the ray tracing: it goes after the upkeep. Its author complains that GOG ships an out-of-date installer, missing the fixes that had been going around elsewhere for a while, and with no Linux version — that one, the text says, only turns up outside the store. The question the author leaves hanging is blunt: why distribute something nobody ever comes back to update?

Another complaint, posted in December 2025, takes aim at the store page itself: the game's name, the link pointing to the paid Quad Damage release and the absence of any clear warning that this version includes only the first levels leave anyone who already owns the original Quake II unable to tell the two pages apart. If you already own the original game, it's easy to open the wrong page without noticing — you only find out after you've already clicked.

A Portuguese-language review from March 2024 gives it a low score for the opposite reason to the praise: for this player, ray tracing adds nothing to an old game — the lighting clashes with the rest of the visuals and eats up performance the original version never needed. The same review echoes the complaint about the missing Linux support. These are gripes from people who know the subject: nobody spells out a compatibility layer or a version number without having first tried to get the game running properly.

A new GPU, yes; the whole campaign, no

Anyone with a ray-tracing-capable card who wants to see what the technique does to the original material comes away satisfied with very little: it's only three levels, but the demonstration wins you over before the first enemy shows up. It's the kind of thing you notice before you've even opened the first door.

Anyone after the full campaign, multiplayer or a Linux version runs into a wall this version doesn't knock down: getting past it means buying Quad Damage separately, and Linux users find no alternative at all. Anyone who values the original look over the new lighting — that's exactly the Portuguese review's gripe, lighting that doesn't fit the rest and wastes performance for nothing — is better off not installing it: here ray tracing isn't an optional setting, it's the whole reason the package exists.