An AMD R&D engineer adds full path-tracing to classic FPS Return to Castle Wolfenstein

A senior R&D engineer at AMD recently showcased Wolf PT, a mod that adds full path-tracing to id Software's classic Return To Castle Wolfenstein. @diharaw94 shared screenshots of Wolf PT in action, as well as some details about the project. Wolf PT is based on iortcw, a fork of the open source Quake 3 port ioquake3, albeit with a modern DX12 backend. 

The screenshots @diharaw94 shared showcase significant improvements to visuals, with the game's static lighting completely replaced. It is clearly early days, though. The screenshots shared show noise artifacts and @diharaw94 has not yet worked materials. As it stands, Wolf PT overhauls lighting and shadows, but does little else. If the developer manages to add PBR-based textures, we might see more striking results as in Quake II RTX.

Rumors and leaks indicate that AMD is doubling down on ray-tracing with its upcoming RDNA3 graphics cards. Between the lack of credible upscaling tech (until the arrival of FSR 2.0) and lower-performance RT cores, RDNA2 cards simply didn't handle ray-traced workloads as well as the NVIDIA competition. With both RTX 4000 and RX 7000 series cards likely arriving later this year, it'll be interesting to see how well AMD flagships run Wolf PT. 

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