FSR 2, DLSS 2, and XeSS are added to the Return to Castle Wolfenstein Path Tracing Mod

Approximately six and a half months ago, AMD Core Tech Group Graphics Engineer Dihara Wijetunga announced that he was working on a path-tracing hack for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. We were given a new update in late August that included a few recently taken screenshots.

Now that 2022 is almost behind us, Wijetunga revealed the new implementation of all the leading temporal upscaling technologies (AMD FSR 2, NVIDIA DLSS 2, and Intel XeSS) into the Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod. These technologies are listed in the following order: AMD FSR 2, NVIDIA DLSS 2, and Intel XeSS.

Over the weekend, I updated the RTCW route tracer with support for FSR 2, DLSS 2, and XeSS! After working on the path tracing side, I decided it would be best to move on to something simpler.

The following is what an AMD Graphics Engineer said when a user questioned Wijetunga about the release date of the Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod:

By the end of the following year, I’m hoping to get something published. Since I’m working on it by myself, for the most part, I’m making very little headway.

Wijetunga also verified that the motion blur option in the graphics settings relates to per-object motion blur, which is the most complex form of the feature.

Gray Matter, a video game developer, based in Los Angeles that is no longer in business, was the company that first released Return to Castle Wolfenstein in November 2001. Even though Xbox and PlayStation 2 ports had already been launched by the time January 2004 rolled around, the game managed to sell two million copies by that point.

The multiplayer component of the game, created by Nerve Software and Splash Damage, received the lion’s share of the plaudits from reviewers. The average score on Metacritic was 88 out of 100, which is evidence that reviews were quite positive.

There is a possibility that the Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod will be released after somebody else has already discovered a method to include NVIDIA’s RTX Remix tool into the PC classic game.

The current roadblock is that Return to Castle Wolfenstein uses the OpenGL application programming interface (API). In contrast, RTX Remix is only compatible with DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games that use fixed-function graphics pipelines. However, this limitation could be circumvented by using an OpenGL to DX9 wrapper.