Overview
The whole of Quake, as points
A GPU holographic point-cloud renderer for vkQuake on Windows 11. The entire Quake world, brushes, models and effects alike, is rebuilt every frame as a dense point cloud held in a persistent Vulkan SSBO, culled and compacted on the GPU, and drawn with a single indirect call.
Every particle keeps a stable ID from frame to frame, so the cloud is anchored to the geometry it was sampled from rather than re-rolled. Four styles are selectable at the console. Inferno is the reference look: amber-lidar terrain, scarlet monsters with white-hot internal cores, heavy bloom and chromatic aberration.
It is renderer-only. Gameplay, entity state, QuakeC, demos, RNG, collision and AI are untouched, and r_holo 0 restores stock vkQuake.
Specification
Tech spec
| Host | vkQuake |
|---|---|
| Platform | Windows 11 |
| API | Vulkan |
| Particle store | Persistent SSBO |
| Culling | Compute shader, per particle |
| Identity | Stable particle IDs across frames |
| Compaction | GPU, no CPU readback |
| Draw path | Indirect drawing from GPU-written counts |
| Styles | r_holo_style — Cyber, Spectral, Plasma, Inferno |
| Post | Bloom, chromatic aberration |
| Scope | Renderer only. Gameplay, QuakeC, demos, RNG, collision, AI unchanged |
| Off switch | r_holo 0 — stock vkQuake |
Features
What it does
- Dense world sampling. World brushes, alias models and sprites are all sampled into one cloud, so the scene reads as a single scan rather than a set of decorated meshes.
- Persistent SSBO. The particle set lives on the GPU across frames. Nothing is re-uploaded per frame beyond the entity transforms the game already produces.
- Compute culling and compaction. Frustum and distance culling run in compute; survivors are compacted into a tight buffer and the draw count is written by the GPU.
- Indirect draw. One indirect call per pass. The CPU never learns how many points made it through.
- Stable IDs. Each point has an identity that survives across frames, so the cloud does not swim, flicker or re-seed when the camera moves.
- Four styles.
r_holo_styleswitches between Cyber, Spectral, Plasma and Inferno without a restart. - Inferno look. Amber-lidar terrain, scarlet monsters with white-hot cores, heavy bloom and chromatic aberration.
- Strictly a renderer. Demos play back identically, multiplayer stays in sync, and
r_holo 0puts everything back.
Media
Gallery
