[GAMES] Quake II RTX!

[Hasturtium]

I can't believe I'm typing this, but - with some caveats - Quake II RTX compiles and runs under Fedora 37 with an RDNA2 Radeon on Power9. The gotchas:

* If you're copying your Windows folder over and you care about preserving your saved games, make sure the contents of Q2RTX/baseq2/save are moved to ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/save. If you don't, and you leave the Windows save folder intact, the executable will throw an error when trying to load a new game or save because it can't rectify the presence of the Windows folder with the presence of the Linux folder.
* For some reason I can't get timedemo functionality to work - attempting to load a timedemo from the console results in "Couldn't load maps/demo1.dm2.bsp: No such file or directory".
EDIT: * The game may bomb out at startup complaining that it can't find a Vulkan-capable GPU (despite the logs indicating it successfully queried both your Vulkan GPU as well as llvmpipe). In that case, manually edit ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/q2config.cfg and change the line seta ray_tracing_api value from "auto" to "query". I tried setting this to “pipeline” on a lark to test the other raytracing method it supports, and that crashes the executable because it apparently can’t find the extensions it’s looking for.

Nevertheless it runs at around 60 fps at 1080p on an RX 6600 with resolution scaling set to 65%, which doesn't trail the Windows version with the same card too much at all. There is some minor visual corruption at the periphery of the screen, but with some more testing and bugfixes that can probably be fixed. Back to Stroggos I go...

[ClassicHasClass]

Coooool. Got a screenshot?

[tle]

I can't believe I'm typing this, but - with some caveats - Quake II RTX compiles and runs under Fedora 37 with an RDNA2 Radeon on Power9. The gotchas:

* If you're copying your Windows folder over and you care about preserving your saved games, make sure the contents of Q2RTX/baseq2/save are moved to ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/save. If you don't, and you leave the Windows save folder intact, the executable will throw an error when trying to load a new game or save because it can't rectify the presence of the Windows folder with the presence of the Linux folder.
* For some reason I can't get timedemo functionality to work - attempting to load a timedemo from the console results in "Couldn't load maps/demo1.dm2.bsp: No such file or directory".
EDIT: * The game may bomb out at startup complaining that it can't find a Vulkan-capable GPU (despite the logs indicating it successfully queried both your Vulkan GPU as well as llvmpipe). In that case, manually edit ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/q2config.cfg and change the line seta ray_tracing_api value from "auto" to "query". I tried setting this to “pipeline” on a lark to test the other raytracing method it supports, and that crashes the executable because it apparently can’t find the extensions it’s looking for.

Nevertheless it runs at around 60 fps at 1080p on an RX 6600 with resolution scaling set to 65%, which doesn't trail the Windows version with the same card too much at all. There is some minor visual corruption at the periphery of the screen, but with some more testing and bugfixes that can probably be fixed. Back to Stroggos I go...

That's interesting that you could get it loaded. It does not really work for me. 1stly I need to enable the raytracing flag for mesa. 2ndly the game came back with error "This GPU is not supported"

[power9mm]

Nice theres a competent benchmark for the system now.. i was going with an older card for my build for now but i'd definitely like to try vulkan raytracing. maybe in a  year or two when support is more stable.

[Hasturtium]

I can't believe I'm typing this, but - with some caveats - Quake II RTX compiles and runs under Fedora 37 with an RDNA2 Radeon on Power9. The gotchas:

* If you're copying your Windows folder over and you care about preserving your saved games, make sure the contents of Q2RTX/baseq2/save are moved to ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/save. If you don't, and you leave the Windows save folder intact, the executable will throw an error when trying to load a new game or save because it can't rectify the presence of the Windows folder with the presence of the Linux folder.
* For some reason I can't get timedemo functionality to work - attempting to load a timedemo from the console results in "Couldn't load maps/demo1.dm2.bsp: No such file or directory".
EDIT: * The game may bomb out at startup complaining that it can't find a Vulkan-capable GPU (despite the logs indicating it successfully queried both your Vulkan GPU as well as llvmpipe). In that case, manually edit ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/q2config.cfg and change the line seta ray_tracing_api value from "auto" to "query". I tried setting this to “pipeline” on a lark to test the other raytracing method it supports, and that crashes the executable because it apparently can’t find the extensions it’s looking for.

Nevertheless it runs at around 60 fps at 1080p on an RX 6600 with resolution scaling set to 65%, which doesn't trail the Windows version with the same card too much at all. There is some minor visual corruption at the periphery of the screen, but with some more testing and bugfixes that can probably be fixed. Back to Stroggos I go...

That's interesting that you could get it loaded. It does not really work for me. 1stly I need to enable the raytracing flag for mesa. 2ndly the game came back with error "This GPU is not supported"

It came up pretty easily with my RX 6600 with the 6.1.5 kernel that was pushed out over the weekend. Biggest thing to do is to manually edit that line in the config file in the original post to specify "query" versus "auto" - I think something in Quake II’s feature polling mechanism breaks when it can't find the "pipeline" method it's looking for exposed in the driver. Give it a try and let me know what you think... It'll be a lot more interesting to see this on Intel's xe driver for Arc cards in a few months' time, given that their early fork of the old i915 driver already comes up on arm64. Intel’s raytracing speed is much more competitive with Nvidia’s - having tried an A750 and the RX 6600 in Windows, it isn’t a stretch to say Intel’s card manages at least as well at 1440p as the Radeon does at 1080p.

ClassicHasClass, I'll be happy to in a bit.

[Hasturtium]

So. Screenshots.





Not much to start, but I can provide more soon. Performance is kinda variable and slower than it is in Windows, but it's still entirely doable. As said before I'd expect Arc support via the xe driver to be much faster whenever that lands. Early days - I'd expect subsequent Mesa revisions to continue improving speed for RDNA2 on Power.

[power9mm]

well now I'd like to get a new gpu to play it, but i think i'll wait a bit for driver updates.. Still one of the best gaming benchmarks out there, and runs on POWER too..

[ClassicHasClass]

Yeah, some glitches, but not many. Looks way better than the original.

[power9mm]

should I wait for the intel arc gpu drivers over AMD? i've wanted to play this since it came out and I'd rather wait for power9 support to play it. I might opt for an a770 gpu over an AMD card if it plays well. Maybe a bit off topic but should one even trust an intel gpu moreso over an amd/nvidia lol..?

[Hasturtium]

should I wait for the intel arc gpu drivers over AMD? i've wanted to play this since it came out and I'd rather wait for power9 support to play it. I might opt for an a770 gpu over an AMD card if it plays well. Maybe a bit off topic but should one even trust an intel gpu moreso over an amd/nvidia lol..?

In x86_64 land Intel’s the gold standard for open video drivers - hassle-free, exposed features that work without too much fuss, and as well-behaved as the hardware’s capabilities allow. They’re at an inflection point now that xe is being forked from i915 to provide dedicated support for 12th Gen and Arc hardware, but they have a funded and capable driver team and it’ll probably come up pretty fast. I can’t tell you where to spend your money, but once Arc has become a going concern on ppc64le I’m planning to swap the RX 6600 into my Windows machine so the Arc can be in my Blackbird. The video encoding is stupid good - if I can get OBS working, that’ll make everything from Blu-Ray transcoding to desktop capture overwhelmingly nicer on the platform for me.

[tle]

Finally get the game working! Yay!

[tle]

The q2rtxded was complaining about "Could not load library gamex86.so" so what I did is I copy my `gameppc64le.so` to `gamex86.so`. Not the best way but I could not find much details how the game workout the library filename.

[tle]

Btw I submitted a Pull Request upstream https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/pull/260

[ClassicHasClass]

@tle, also being a Fedoran, which card and which kernel (I'm currently on 6.1.6)?

[Hasturtium]

The game was complaining about "Could not load library gamex86.so" so what I did is I copy my `gameppc64le.so` to `gamex86.so`. Not the best way but I could not find much details how the game workout the library filename.

Ack! I forgot to mention that step. I could’ve sworn mine compiled to gamex86_64.so, but I copied the file to gamex86.so and then it didn’t give me any hassle.

@tle, also being a Fedoran, which card and which kernel (I'm currently on 6.1.6)?

I’m running on 6.1.6 with an XFX Radeon RX 6600, though it also worked with kernel 6.1.5. Both have worked with Fedora’s current Mesa release. Reported framerate didn’t necessarily correlate to onscreen framerate, though it did become more consistent when vsync was enabled. It’ll be interesting to see how this improves as time goes on.