Modder adds ray tracing to original Doom

The grandfather of the shooters draws attention again. This time, a modder has provided the first three episodes of the classic game with ray-traced lighting through path tracing. That makes for quite striking pictures.

Mud Sultim Tsyrendashiev induces In addition to ray tracing, it also supports DLSS and FSR, to boost the game’s performance after the demanding lighting has been introduced. Its PRBoom+ RT engine is an evolution of the PrBoom+ source port of the Doom engine. In addition to ray-tracing lighting, the mod also offers bloom, which was so strong in the first version of the mod that it was reminiscent of video games from about 15 years ago. That has now been rectified.

The ray-traced lighting doesn’t just make the game look different. Because light sources have been made so decisive for what is visible and what is not, a lot has been made bad and invisible, temporarily or permanently. The inky shadows here and there give off a bit more of a horror atmosphere, which is a bit reminiscent of Doom 3. Enemies that are lit from behind and are therefore visible to the player as a moving shadow also give the gameplay a much more cinematic feel.

However, to try the mod, players will need to provide their own .wad files from Doom. For now, the function is only supported on Nvidia video cards, and then presumably specifically the RTX 2000 series and newer. Another retro shooter from id Software with pathtracing is Quake II.