Quake remaster owners should go download its free next-gen upgrade (2024)

aerogems said:

I mean, while this is nice and all for people who already bought the game... I really just wish companies would spend more time on new IP, not just an endless array of remasters or rereleases. Remakes, like FF7, are an acceptable compromise within reason. The FF7 remake was only loosely based on the PS1 version, and was probably like 80% original content, so I would consider that the benchmark. For whatever my opinion on the matter isn't worth to those in the industry.

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But isn't that what the vast majority of new release are? New games, rather than remasters of old ones. A lot of them are sequels, admittedly, but they are still new IP.

So my position is more or less the opposite. I view the time around 2000 as being a golden age for video games, with ones like the original Half Life, Thief 2, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, all being fantastic. I would like to be able to play them again on my PS5. New games are good too, and for example I've recently been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of Us, but I found that I paused both of them to play this new Quake release because it was more fun. (Part of that was down to the control scheme. RDR-2 has very clunky controls, which each button seeming do to 2 or 3 different things depending on what the game thinks you ought to be doing.)

hestermofet said:

Geebs said:

hestermofet said:

Geebs said:

(Edit: Yes, I know they updated the models. For reference, that takes the total polygon count on screen from “a single car in Gran Turismo” up to about “a single car in Gran Turismo 3”)

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If you think this remaster is just an update to polygon counts on the models, I don't think anyone will complain if you don't enable the new remastered features, and play the original version.

Geez man, how pathetic do you have to be to complain about something free, and demand "more!"

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Not at all, I’m just wondering what Bethesda did on a technical level to the ludicrously efficient Quake engine. The original is a real Carmack masterpiece; for example the implementation of BSPs means that there is zero overdraw when it renders the level geometry. That, plus a polygon budget of 200 *for the entire frame* means that a console that regularly uses 100,000 to 500,000 polys *for a single character* really shouldn’t be bound either by geometry or by fill rate. The game logic in Quake uses literally 0% of the CPU in a profiling, so it’s not that either.

When Bethesda did the Doom remasters they messed up all sorts of things because they switched to Unity for some reason, so they have history for taking a ridiculously efficient game engine and making it run like garbage. A few extra polys and some slightly improved lighting don’t explain the discrepancy.

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Thanks for clarifying your question, and I apologize for my saltiness. The Quake Remaster is a total re-implementation in Nightdive's Kex engine. It's the same engine used for the Doom 64 Remaster. It was covered in the first Ars article about it. It's not based on Carmack's original engine. Does it NEED a PS5? Not at all, it runs just fine on my Celeron dual-core, non-hyperthreaded J4005. But it can certainly benefit from the extra power of a PS5. Carmack's engine doesn't scale in the same way to give better quality/performance with high level hardware like that.

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Neither the new Dooms or the new Quake are actually recoded into Unity or Kex. Unity and Kex are more like "shells", an easily portable "wrapper" around the original game's engines which at the core are still what the games are running in. Unity and Kex are two easy ways to allow those old engines to get ported to whatever hardware they like, but they are not true game engines all by themselves. This isn't like what they did back in the 90's when Doom was ported to SNES and a brand new engine was actually coded from the ground up to make that happen.