A Modder Has Created Doom With Next-Gen Capabilities, See The Video
Modders do some of the best work in video games, and that is certainly the case for a new version of Doom that contains next-gen capabilities.
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The original Doom game, released in 1993, features some outdated visuals which allow modern gaming rigs to push the title over 1,000 fps by default. Of course, this doesn’t improve the visuals, considering that the human eye can perceive past 60-240 fps, but it provides plenty of computational power for some computationally expensive lightning techniques like ray tracing. And while the game’s official handlers haven’t provided much in terms of improvements, the massive Doom gaming community just received the first three episodes of Doom with ray tracing enabled. You can see the video below:
According to Kotaku, the new visual mode for the original 1993’s Doom was dropped on Friday by a mod creator Sultim-T, which adds real-time path tracing to the PrBoom source port of the original Doom game. And though it supports only three episodes of the classic shooter game, it dramatically changes the way Doom looks and feels — quite good and surprisingly performative. Unfortunately, though, the chances of running these mods on your Samsung Smart Fridge are basically nonexistent — unless it sports Nvidia RTX graphics.
Installing the new mode for Doom is straightforward; you need an original Doom.wad file to run the game in conjunction it a PrBoom mode, and that’s it. Sultim-T explained that the mod only works on Nvidia GPUs, but some gamers reported that the mod ran fine on certain AMD models as well. Both GPU manufacturers employ different upscaling technologies that allow Doom ray tracing to perform quite well, running at 60fps on 2160p resolutions. So, despite almost every PC being able to run the original Doom at incredible fps metrics, running the game with ray tracing enabled does require a decently powerful PC.
The ray tracing mod makes the game look more realistic and very similar to Doom 3, with its dimly lit hallways. Fortunately, the improved lighting affects the simple textures and geometry of the original title, making it look younger and scarier than it actually is. However, this isn’t the only iD Software that got the ray tracing treatment. Nvidia, which brought ray tracing to commercially available GPUs, teamed with iD Software to create Quake II RTX in 2019, a version of the classic shooter that also utilized real-time ray-tracing technology. So now there’s talk about a reboot of the franchise.
And while 1993’s Doom hasn’t received the official treatment, the members of its massive community continuously share various updates for the original game, including the new ray-tracing mod. As we previously stated, modders made the original game playable through Twitter on smart refrigerators and have even made it playable on pregnancy tests. As a result, the list of things that can run Doom is expanding rapidly.
If you’re interested in trying out these mods, the source code and the playable build of this updated version of Doom can be found on GitHub. Most gamers that have tested these mods ran them through overclocked GPUs, so your mileage, in terms of frames-per-seconds, may vary depending on your GPU and its driver settings. However, playing one of the original first-person shooters with net-gen capabilities looks fantastic.
