vkQuake, a Vulkan-based port of the classic Quake engine, has been released in version 1.37.0.

vkQuake renders the original 1996 Quake through modern Vulkan graphics and supports high resolutions, high frame rates and optional ray tracing.

The main additions are ambient occlusion for monsters, items and other entities, an independent render resolution with a sharp HUD, expanded controller support with gyro aiming and rumble, and automatic saves in single player. Much of it comes from Ironwail.

Improvements:

• Added ambient occlusion from monsters, items and other entities onto nearby level geometry, giving them more natural contact shading. Low, Medium and High quality settings are available; Low is enabled by default. Note that this may reduce performance on older hardware and can be turned off.
• Added independent render resolution: run the game at a lower resolution while keeping menus, text and the HUD sharp at the display resolution.
• Expanded controller support with gyro aiming, flick stick, rumble, alternate button bindings and a dedicated controller settings menu (from Ironwail)
• Added automatic single-player saves, favoring quieter moments between combat. Saves are written in the background, and the Load menu now includes autosave and quicksave entries (autosaves and background saving from Ironwail)
• Added live previews when changing graphics and selected game options, including underwater effects and message backgrounds (from Ironwail)
• Added language selection and automatic language detection for rerelease content, and support for loading the rerelease’s newer save format (from Ironwail)
• Added mod-defined actions to the key bindings menu (from Ironwail)
• Added an optional player-speed display, adjustable weapon-model position and backgrounds behind on-screen messages (from Ironwail)
• Mod folders, maps, demos and saves can now be passed directly to the executable, including by dragging them onto it (from Ironwail)
• Improved Alkaline compatibility, including underwater screen and sound effects for its moving liquid volumes (from Ironwail)
• FTE particles now blend softly into nearby surfaces, and particles and decals respond to fog
• Performance: faster texture loading, more efficient draw grouping and skybox caching to avoid reloading skies when a map switches between them (skybox caching from Ironwail)
• Updated graphics defaults for fresh configurations: borderless fullscreen, VSync, 4x MSAA and anisotropic filtering
• Refined menu spacing and sliders, clarified fullscreen options, sorted mods by display name and added an option to disable mouse input in menus (layout refinements by @vsonnier)
• Added sky-name completion and a skies command, a writeconfig command and reverse cycling through console-variable values. Querying a variable now also shows its default value (new commands from Ironwail)
• Added a persistent option to dismiss the Steam-not-running prompt
• Updated libxmp to 4.7.3 (by @sezero)

Fixes:

• #1014 : Fixed the window growing on each launch on high-DPI displays, and corrected menu mouse positioning (by @AllMelody)
• #1017 : Fixed mouse selection of TCP/IP and other menu items, clicks without mouse movement, and clicks outside selectable rows. Holding a key no longer repeatedly activates menu actions
• Fixed additional moving-platform and collision compatibility issues, including mod-defined ground state, disabled platforms retaining riders and incorrect downward velocity after landing
• Fixed give all to use the active mod’s weapon and item rules
• Fixed custom HUD scaling at different resolutions and incorrect sizing of high-resolution UI replacements
• Improved decal depth handling, dynamic-light placement and modern crosshair blending, and fixed particle-texture initialization and palettized screen-effect edge cases
• Fixed Vulkan synchronization and ray-tracing resource handling, improved recovery when the display surface is lost, and worked around ambient-occlusion flickering with MoltenVK on MacOS
• Fixed ProQuake view-angle decoding and FTE network acknowledgements, and split large map-startup messages to avoid signon-buffer overflows
• Configuration scripts now consistently use vkQuake.cfg instead of falling back to another engine’s config.cfg
• Existing saves are preserved until a background save has finished writing. Fixed the HUD pain face persisting after fastload or demo rewind
• Fixed skybox-cache leaks and cleanup errors (cache-leak fix by @vsonnier)
• Hardened map, network and menu string handling, including client-provided player names (#1018, player-name fix by Dirk Mueller)

The Linux AppImage requires glibc 2.35 or later and FUSE. Download the AppImage directly, make it executable with chmod +x vkQuake-*.AppImage, then run it. Older distributions can build from source.

Source: GitHub