New Mod Brings Ray Tracing To Doom Classic

A new visual mod was announced on April Fools’ Day for the original 1993 release of Doom, adding real-time path tracing to the PrBoom source port of the game.

The mod was brought to us by the modder sultim-t and it currently supports the first three episodes of the first-person classic shooter and also dramatically changes the way the game looks, adding more modern lighting.

Here is a video of the mod in action:

Installing this new Doom mod is fairly simple, only requiring you to follow a few simple steps. You will need the original Doom.wad file to run the mod, but it’s likely you will have this somewhere on your computer. When you have that, it’s then just a case of downloading the mod for PrBoom.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for you to follow, should you need it:

Installation

1. Unzip prboom-rt.zip to an empty folder
2. Place the original game’s DOOM.wad to that folder
3. Run prboom-plus.exe

Optional:

• High-quality music:
  • download OGG Pack (Boosted), and copy MUSIC folder to the target folder
• DLSS:
  • download nvngx_dlss.dll, and place it to the target folder

It’s worth noting that although this is an old game that won’t necessarily need decent hardware in order to run, having raytracing enabled will require a pretty decent computer as it is very demanding and will require a fairly recent GPU in order to run.

This isn’t the first time we have seen older titles getting raytracing updates, however. In 2019 Nvidia teamed up with Id to create Quake II RTX, a version of the classic shooter which also included raytracing.

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