Classic Doom gets ray tracing, but only for Nvidia GPUs
Rip and trace
Doom – the 1993 one – can famously run on all manner of stuff that generally has no business running games, from inkjet printers to pregnancy tests. You’ll be wanting a bonafide PC for this new mod, though, as it adds some GPU-intensive but rather lovely ray tracing to Doom’s first three episodes. There’s DLSS support too!
Whereas Quake II RTX was partly an official Nvidia effort, this is a proper indie mod, freely available on GitHub from its creator sultim-t. Hark, a trailer:
Aw, isn’t that nice. The mod originally launched on April 1st, but it’s no joke, and has already received a couple of updates to smooth out some issues and tone down the heavy bloom you can see in the trailer. There is one catch, besides only the first three episodes being included: right now ray tracing only works on Nvidia graphics cards. Granted, even our own best graphics cards list is a bit of a GeForce-fest at the moment, but keep in mind that AMD Radeon cards aren’t currently compatible even if they can handle ray tracing in other, much more modern games.
There were mumblings all the way back in 2019, when Quake II RTX launched, that Nvidia’s Lightspeed Studios would begin a side hustle in ray traced remasters of other old classics. Such results never materialised, though, with Lightspeed Studios focusing on the likes of Minecraft RTX and games for the Android-based Nvidia Shield, along with chipping on the Nintendo Switch ports of Portal and Portal 2.
In this particular case, it’s been the long-active Doom modding community that’s stepped in instead. All the necessary files and installation instructions are, again, on GitHub; note that to have DLSS help offset the performance cost of ray tracing, you’ll need to download and add the .dll file separately.