The grandfather of all first-person shooters from 1993, Doom, has been beefed up with a ray-traced mod. For friends of the radiant technology and the graphics of games in general, this little treat is worth a look. And of course, as an old hand, it’s amusing to see the fondly remembered but realistically heavily dated graphics decked out with the finest, state-of-the-art lighting. We looked at the classic and measured the performance hunger of different graphics cards.
The ray tracing support for the shooter classic Doom is worth a closer look, and not just because the graphical leap through ray tracing promises to be particularly large in the old shooter from 1993. Basically, despite the three-dimensional perspective, it is not a 3D game in the modern sense – but this is actually a prerequisite for modern ray tracing display. Doom doesn’t use lights like today’s games, it doesn’t use 3D objects, and it uses bitmap surfaces that have relatively little to do with today’s texture representation. So let’s take a look at Doom and how dynamic ray-traced lighting can freshen up an old shooter with sprite graphics.
Of course, the splendor described has its costs. You pay for graphics performance – almost exclusively. In our practical test with PrBoom RT 1.0.6, the current mod version, it quickly turned out that the raytracing-boosted classic can crush any modern graphics card in maximum quality. That’s right, despite various temporal efficiency tricks, the comprehensive modernization is extremely expensive and a challenge for all available graphics cards. Each added pixel means additional rays, so resolution has a significant impact on frame rate. That’s why new upscaling processes are springing up like mushrooms. By default, Doom Ray Traced and PrBoom offer two options for saving pixels: a simple upscaler that decouples the internal from the external (monitor) resolution, and AMD’s FSR 1.0. As mentioned, Nvidia’s DLSS version 2.4 can also be loaded, but is not included in the standard download. In the video, we therefore also show benchmark samples with current high-end GPUs.
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