Ray tracing was run without a graphics card, yielding a spectacular Quake 2 RTX slide show
Translated with AI from the Russian original.
Quake 2 RTX has challenged many PCs. One enthusiast wanted to see what would happen if they tried playing without a GPU
Quake 2 RTX has been haunting some tech enthusiasts for years. The updated classic allows testing a PC build's durability. In 2024, one experimenter decided to approach running the game from an unconventional angle.
The developers assumed that Quake 2 RTX would be played on a graphics card no lower than an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, but Konstantin Seurer decided to forgo a GPU altogether. The enthusiast proposed enabling ray tracing on the processor (CPU).
The Mesa 3D graphics library developer implemented CPU-based ray tracing support in Vulkan.
Konstantin Seurer immediately cut off the expected question: “Don’t ask about performance.” There is not much practical value in this experiment at the moment; what is happening resembles not whirlwind gameplay, but a regular “slide show.” Judging by the counter, it’s 1 frame per second (1 FPS), with GPU load at 0% and CPU at 34%. It is also not entirely clear which specific processor the enthusiast used for this technical experiment with Quake 2 RTX.
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