The computer and game industries have had their fair share of tropes over the years. Like in the late 2000s when “Will it run crysis?” was demanded of every computing device marketed after the release of a hardware-punitive title. Few game tropes are as prolific as “Can you put Doom on it?”
But the coolest news about id Software’s Doom today? The nearly 30-year-old game has had a facelift! Thanks to the work of a Github user, Sultim Tsyrendashiev, we now have a ray-traced-enabled fork of PrBoom. This allows anyone who owns a legitimate copy of a Doom to load up their favorite classic shooter and enjoy beautiful reflections provided by their ray-tracing-compatible graphics cards! If you don’t have a GPU capable of ray tracing, you can drool over it with the YouTube curated so beautifully by Sultim to showcase its engineering prowess.
Although used in Hexen, Heretic and Doom II, this particular instance of PrBoom will of course only work with an original Doom 1 WAD or Shareware file. We tried. That said, based on the number of other emulators that support loading Doom wad files, it wouldn’t be too far off to see it implemented at some point in the future, if not from Sultim, someone else. Here’s the hope!
