Return to Castle Wolfenstein Path Tracing Mod Gets FSR 2, DLSS 2 & XeSS; Tentative Release Set for Late 2023

Around six and a half months ago, AMD Core Tech Group Graphics Engineer Dihara Wijetunga announced he was working on a Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod. We got an update in late August with a handful of fresh screenshots. Now that 2022 is almost behind us, Wijetunga revealed the new implementation of all the main temporal upscaling technologies (AMD FSR 2, NVIDIA DLSS 2, and Intel XeSS) into the Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod.

Added FSR 2, DLSS 2, and XeSS to the RTCW path tracer over the weekend! Wanted to tackle something easier after working on the path tracing side.

When a user asked Wijetunga about the release date of the Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod, the AMD Graphics Engineer said:

I’m hoping to have something out by late next year. It’s mostly a solo effort, so progress is a bit slow.

Wijetunga also confirmed that the motion blur option in the graphics settings refers to per-object motion blur, which is the more advanced version.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein originally launched in November 2001, developed by the now-defunct Los Angeles game developer Gray Matter. The game managed to sell two million units by January 2004, though by that time, Xbox and PlayStation 2 ports had also been released. Critic reviews were very high, as testified by the 88/100 average score on Metacritic, with the multiplayer side of the game (developed by Nerve Software and Splash Damage) getting the lion’s share of the praise.

There’s a chance the Return to Castle Wolfenstein path tracing mod may launch when someone else has already used found a way to inject NVIDIA’s RTX Remix tool into the PC classic game. The current obstacle is that Return to Castle Wolfenstein uses the OpenGL API, whereas RTX Remix only works with DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games that use fixed-function graphics pipelines, but an OpenGL to DX9 wrapper could get around that limitation.