That's super interesting, like the detail is low, obviously but the realness of the lighting almost feels better than a lot of triple A games I've played lately in a way that makes this almost feel more real.
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/classic_doom_has_r...
https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-being-us...
There are plenty of texture upgrades available for Quake, but I haven't really seen any model updates.
So yes, upgrading models and even the level geometry would be very cool IMO.
Q2VKPT seems like a rich area of research. If the entire pipeline could be automated. Using efficient subdivision surfaces and deep learning to intelligently predict light-transport simulation. Then we would merely have to input the game assets of a classic game title. And the output would look like Bioware's Anthem ;)
Train the game upscaling AI with high resolution textures, then ship the game with lower res textures. High quality rendering with smaller file sizes, though won't be as good as the original pictures.
Not very useful in reality, but would be a pretty neat proof of concept.
The question is: would the AI data be smaller than shipping the high quality textures in the first place?
Q2VKPT is different in that it does no traditional rasterization at all for the 3d graphics (only the HUD graphics are rasterized). The rest is path traced with multiple reflections even for the diffuse surfaces. Because of this purity in its approach it is quite unique.
QVKPT is from the guy who invented the postprocessing filter used to denoise the images in this implementation. The graphics would be way worse without that filter (there has to be a convar to disable it).
no filter: http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/images/path_tracer_720p.png denoised: http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/images/denoised_720p.png
The denoise filter might as well be the main achievement of this project. Edit: note that if I understand correctly, the filter doesn't operate on single frames, but considers several previous frames in order to maintain temporal cohesion and to improve quality.
Do you happen to know how bad are the artifacts? I remember temporal antialiasing produced very good results with static scenes, but fell apart on dynamic ones.
The lighting in this version of Q2 is vastly more physically correct than in a lot of current generation modern engines. So it really should feel more real. I think this shows why hardware accelerated ray tracing is such a big deal for realtime graphics.