Why You Should Play the Original Doom With Ray Tracing
When you hear the words ‘ray tracing’, your mind is likely to come up with cutting-edge games. Ray tracing wasn’t used in mainstream PC GPUs until 2018, and only the latest generation of consoles support the technology, so it wasn’t a big deal for most of the gaming community until recently. However, retro games can benefit from ray tracing – even a nearly 30 year old classic like Doom .
For the uninitiated, ray tracing is a rendering process that creates more realistic lighting conditions in games than traditional lighting techniques in games. Essentially, the “beams” come from the player’s point of view; if the beam hits an object, it then goes to the nearest light source, so it knows how that object should be illuminated. This is the opposite approach where the computer is ray tracing for all the lights in an area, since you are only ray tracing the rays that are being processed at any given time.
Back on topic, developer sultim-t has created a version of Doom that uses ray tracing really well. Note that this is not one of the new entries in the franchise: Sultim-t added ray tracing to the first three episodes of Doom back in 1993.
As you can see from the sample video below, the results are phenomenal. The game itself remains the same pixelated masterpiece you probably already know and love, but the added ray tracing really makes the environments pop. Dark rooms are creepier, explosions are even more explosive, and lava and plasma glow in fluorescent reds and purples, the mod breathes new life into a 30-year-old game.
To personally test the effect, you will need an Nvidia GPU. (Hopefully we’ll see support for AMD GPUs in the future.) You’ll also need the original Doom ‘s .wad file. You can get this file from a purchased version of Ultimate Doom from stores like Steam or GOG , the latter of which is selling decently at the time of this writing.
If you have an Nvidia GPU, setting up the game is relatively simple: first, download and unzip the prboom-rt.zip file found on the sultim-t GitHub page into a new, empty folder. Drag the DOOM.wad file into this folder, then launch the “prboom-plus” app to get started.
Unfortunately, even with an NVIDIA GPU, some users, including myself, are facing problems: when I try to launch the game, I am greeted with a “Signal 11” error. This is not necessarily a problem with the sultim-t mod. , as this Signal 11 bug seems to be a deprecated PrBoom app issue . With luck, your car won’t run into this problem, and you’ll be able to run Doom ‘s hallways in all their ray-traced glory.
And it’s not the only retro game that uses ray-traced mods. Sultim-t also added ray tracing to Half-Life and Serious Sam TFE . Playing any of them will show you what ray tracing can do, even for games that aren’t set in hell.