“Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/doom-1-1993-gets-full-ray-tracing-dlss-support-in-fan-made-patch/

by jay_kyburz • 4 years ago

285 121 4 years ago

We've come full circle, next-gen consoles will just barely be able to run the original Doom (with ray tracing).

keithnz• 4 years ago

It's very cool, but nothing will compare to when it first came out with its original graphics, we were so blown away, the increase in "Realism" was significant

allenu• 4 years ago

Absolutely. I remember when I first tried the game out in a computer store back then being blown away at how real it all felt.

I will say, seeing the ray tracing clip here with the dynamic shadows sort of gave me that same feeling of seeing Doom for the first way back in the early '90s.

sebastos3• 4 years ago

Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche:

1. I love original doom. 2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games. 3. I have a ton of respect for doom modders and the doubtless huge amount of effort that went into this project. 4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity

To me, the original doom was a piece of art, tuned by artists (I'll say it!) to look a certain way on the computer screen. Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. A pinky demon standing in front of some mid-level gray barrels with greenish ooze... a spare clip - black, with a little orange.

I find that modern games tend to be really visually tiresome and unappealing. Often, this seems to come from overly contrasted, poorly lit scenes. Instead of a painting you get a bad photograph with too much or too little exposure. This seems to be largely the effect you get with ray-traced doom. Instead of the painting that is E1M1, you get this black room occasionally washed out by an awful fluorescent glow.

I think ray-tracing has the potential to create some amazing stuff, but retroactively applying it to doom rather predictably just makes... poorly balanced doom.

jay_kyburz• 4 years ago

Yes, I wanted to say something similar. I would love to see what this looked like with all the textures removed and replaced with simple flat colors or nice crisp vector images.

andrewf3• 4 years ago

I've often felt this way about spruced-up Doom ports. Bilinear texture filtering and hi-res exposes the simplicity of the geometry and textures, it's like when TV went HD, and TV-quality sets/costumes/makeup suddenly looked "worse". It's probably still a net win if you want to blast through third-party levels. See: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20o...

I personally draw the line at colored lighting :)

Naively, I'm interested in whether raytraced Doom would be a good way to experiment with reproducing Doom's original atmospherics in a less pixelated way. Unfiltered texturing, 320x200, and the lossiness of palettized graphics (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.

paulryanrogers2• 4 years ago

I don't think you can have high resolution without an AI+human up-scaling of the art assets. And ideally without the bill-boarding from projecting sprites on polygons. Better to have always facing sprites IMO.

Now if only the up-scaling artists could collaborate with Smooth Doom. That would be a great way to play.

bombcar• 4 years ago

Doom has that "pixel perfect" feeling that many early highly-polished games had. With that few pixels, it's actually possible to consider each one individually and how it works with the whole.

The amount of actual 3D polygon detail you need to imitate that is quite high - compare WarCraft 2 to WarCraft III and Starcraft 2.

thomastjeffery2• 4 years ago

I wonder how good it would look at 320x240 and 16-bit color.

anthk9• 4 years ago

8, you mean. 16 bit allows a big pallete, near true color, but bad gradients.

astrange2• 4 years ago

I used to work on the open source Marathon port and I have to say, I regret us making it high-res bilinear OpenGL just because we could. In the end the effect was to make everything look unbalanced and blurry because the geometry and textures weren't meant to be scaled up so much.

Obviously very different, but Return of the Obra Dinn struck me as a modern game that actually manages to look "low res" in a resolution scalable way.

ovao• 4 years ago

Is there a nearest neighbor option? That gets you (mostly) halfway there at least.

Zardoz84• 4 years ago

GZDoom/Zandronum allows to set to use mipmapping with nearest and anisotropic filtering... Simply looks good and sharp and avoid all problems of blurriness that bilinear/trilinear introduces.

anthk9• 4 years ago

On Alephone and such I always set the filter to a -pixelish- nearest mipmap rendering. I loved that port since the SuSE 8.2 days.

dleslie• 4 years ago

This isn't an uncommon niche; it's not without reason that using meshes never really caught on in the Doom community, despite support for various formats having been in common source ports for decades now.

Personally, I hate the look of bilinear filtered, over-bloomed, real-time shadowed Doom that some folks enjoy with GZDoom and similar.

Part of the charm of the design is because the lighting is _unreal_. The hard transitions between light levels, with the ability sharply transition light levels, led to some absolutely wild horror experiences.

FWIW, my favourite source port is Crispy Doom.

anthk9• 4 years ago

FWIW, my favourite source port is Crispy Doom.

Ditto. I used to use Chocolate Doom, but I want to play Boom compatible PWADs which don't requiere ZDoom (old Celeron+Mobile 4 series user there, GL 2.1 it's a bitch). Also, the changes from Choco to Crispy are almost nil except liming removing support.

Man, I love Doom, Slashem, IF gaming and some libre games which maybe not as graphical intensive as the current AAA games since... 2005? But they are crazy replayable.

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

It reminded me a bit of the Star Wars Special Edition fiasco - puttng 90's CGI into a 70's movie looked bad at the time and terrible now. The footage I saw of this gave me a similar mismatched feeling though I agree it's technically impressive.

Andrew_nenakhov• 4 years ago

Thank God despecialised edition exists!

eproxus• 4 years ago

Speaking of, I think this glossy look would be perfect for a game like Dark Forces [1], rather than Doom. I feel most surfaces in Doom doesn’t really look like they would be so glossy.

But imagine a raytraced imperial starship hangar in Dark Forces instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Dark_Forces

throw7• 4 years ago

You will always be correct and not some "ideological niche". Original means the source. Anything from the origin will always be derivative. If it wasn't it would be original.

pcwalton2• 4 years ago

RTX Doom isn't an exercise in art direction any more than the Cornell Box is an exercise in art direction. If you want an experience shaped by an art director, pick up your favorite title on Steam.

This is a hack that was probably a lot of fun to write and a lot of fun to look at. Hacking support for bleeding-edge GPU technology into a engine from 1993 that doesn't support 3D meshes at all is an impressive feat. I'm glad people are having fun writing such things and don't see the need to critique the aesthetics.

anthk9• 4 years ago

I would love to try this with the Freedoom assets. I play most PWADs with Freedoom too, they look perfectly fine.

skocznymroczny• 4 years ago

It's not hacking support into an engine from 1993. It's adding RTX support to a source port, which is a more modern engine with 3D rendering in mind from the beginning.

However I agree it's nothing more than a fun exercise.

plorg• 4 years ago

I get the feeling that GP was responding more to the article than to the project. The article spends a lot of words suggesting the project makes all other DOOM ports obsolete. Definitely the title suggests that. And given that value judgment I think it's plenty reasonable to offer a critique of "this project is technically impressive but leaves me wanting aesthetically."

I suspect if a different article (say, the project GitHub) had been submitted the comments here would be much different.

millimeterman• 4 years ago

As someone who didn't grow up with the original Doom, I frankly think it looks like an incomprehensible jumble. That's not a knock against the artists - I think the technological limitations simply made a readable 3D game impossible. I'm not saying this is any better, but I think your impression is being colored more by your gameplay experience and nostalgia than by how the game actually looks.

bananamerica2• 4 years ago

It's quite possible that the way you played Doom was not ideal. Chocolate Doom is a project focused on making vanilla Doom look and feel right on modern hardware.

https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About

nigma1337• 4 years ago

As another person who didn't grow up with the original Doom, I think its beautiful. Something about it just feels/looks good.

emptyfile• 4 years ago

4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity

What on earth makes you think Doom with raytracing is anything other then a curiosity? It would be shocking if it turned out to be anything else.

Are posters on this site really so dour to not recognize a bit of... hacking?

xxs• 4 years ago

What on earth makes you think Doom with raytracing is anything other then a curiosity

The attempt to add raytracing to everything w/o any regard of usability, e.g. this in the raytraced version is really hard to see anything if you are shot at.

WithinReason2• 4 years ago

I think a partial reason for that is the huge amounts of "bloom" the guy enabled next to ray tracing

benreesman5• 4 years ago

This is a bit of a meta-comment, but why do these downer comments fastidiously festooned in the language of plausibly-deniable faux-amicability end up at the top?

The right answer to “harmless cool thing that others enjoy but I have zero interest in” is nothing.

This is dope, a lot of people seem to think so. It’s not your cup of tea, fine. You’re allowed to say nothing.

wly_cdgr2• 4 years ago

The right answer is whatever the heck they want to say. As someone who agrees strongly with them I appreciate having my point of view represented.

bko2• 4 years ago

I don't mind the downer comments because they provide information. Even if I think this is impressive and awesome, I don't want to see the top comment "this is impressive and awesome!" That's a low information comment.

High information comments don't have to be critical but they often are. Because it's saying something in opposition to the original post. That's why you often see threads that go back and forth between criticism and response. If you agree, you don't need to say anything.

This guy doesn't have zero interest in it. He mentioned he loves doom, the technology and modders but thinks this takes away from the intended well crafted aesthetic value of the game.

stevage2• 4 years ago

Because people like me vote them up, because we prefer interesting, informed critique rather than uncritical positive support.

amalcon2• 4 years ago

Grandparent seems to be making a point about the nature of art, and how small variants in the medium make a difference. It will date me a bit, but I'll provide an unrelated example:

When I was little, one of my favorite movies was The Wizard of Oz. I have a cherished memory of my grandmother loading the VHS tape, and explaining what it was like to see color on the screen for the first time.

Many years later, my then-S.O. confesses that she's never seen it, so we rent the DVD. The DVD of the Wizard of Oz looks like garbage. It's obvious where the backdrops meet the ground. The costumes barely work. The trees in the Tin Man scene are straight up hilarious. If you've ever watched the original Star Trek series on DVD or Netflix, picture whatever special effect is most obviously fake to you (for me, it's The Doomsday Machine); the whole movie looks like that.

My grandmother had one experience with the film, never having glimpsed a color motion picture before. I had a different experience, watching from a worn VHS tape whose low fidelity masked a lot of the results of the relatively primitive techniques. My then-S.O. had a third experience, as would a child watching a digital version of the film today. Just because that experience is different (and, in many ways, worse) doesn't mean that the film never should have been digitized. Likewise, grandparent's preference for the original more primitive rendering doesn't mean that the ray-tracing mod never should've been made.

sebastos3• 4 years ago

Well, I think it's awesome that somebody tried it. I'd feel bad if the creators saw this thread and felt like HN was rejecting their project or something. I was just curious if anybody else felt the same way I did about how old games that lacked physics-based lighting seemed to look so good.

My theory is that it has to do with how the the screen was always painted with such a bright and wide-ranging palette. One of the other posters described it well as a local optimum. With Doom-style sprites, the art team can decide exactly how the creature / object will look on the screen at render time. Once you introduce physics-based rendering, you always have to consider not just the color of the asset but also the texture, reflectance, and its surroundings (lighting, ambient occlusion, etc.). It's actually very similar to the difference between a painting and a photograph, now that I think about it.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you want each frame to be a painting in a physics-based rendering paradigm, it could turn out that this requires WAY more work to achieve because you have to contend with a combinatorial explosion of interactions between your many assets and light sources. I suspect some studios will assume that all they have to do is take some nice-looking assets and "bump the lamp", but I think ray-traced Doom is a big clue that that won't work out very well. And sure, it will be cool for a few minutes while you marvel at some effect that is only possible with a ray-tracer, but they won't get replayability for free out of that. After a while, the player will get sick of pitch dark hallways with swinging overhead lamps full of glowing crystals or whatever.

My prediction is that ray-traced games may simply find a different approach to beauty. I'm picturing the difference between some renaissance masterpiece and a beautiful black-and-white photograph. Each pretty in their own way.

wly_cdgr2• 4 years ago

Agree, hate it

erwincoumans• 4 years ago

A super cool mod, but agreed. They could have added more ambient light and make the raytracing effect more subtle and probably much prettier, with just a few lines of code. Some areas and shadows became way too dark.

jstummbillig3• 4 years ago

Also: Big fan of Doom

Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas.

Well, that's unreasonably nostalgic. I do agree that a lot of modern games confuse high quality art with effects, but past video games were heavily, and (to their creators) excruciatingly limited by technical feasibility, NOT by deliberate artistic choices.

The classics you remember are not what the creator imagined or wanted. It was the least painful compromise. The creators had two sticks and were hell-bent to build a space station with those. Completely unreasonable. Immensely frustrating. A masterpiece, but definitely not what the creators would have created given more options – least of all id software, which were nothing if not cutting edge.

t0suj42• 4 years ago

It looks like you've single-handedly dismissed all the pixel art created today by saying that.

The art direction was simply chosen based on the available technology.

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

Artistic choices made to adapt to or account for technical constraints are still interesting artistic choices.

I mean you even see this in mainstream western art theory with colors. Only very very recently have painters had a full spectrum of colors and hues available without heavy constraints on some of them like price, toxicity, ability to mix or age in the presence of other colors.

The workarounds painters used could be highly technical, like using combinations of colors that causes optical illusion-like effects implying the difficult color. Or they could be not at all, like simply choosing to paint a setting where you wouldn't need to represent the difficult color.

These later changes, this opening up of technique and color, doesn't diminish the artistic merit of works that came before and had to struggle directly against those constraints. I don't think any artist at any time has been totally free to express their vision without technical constraints.

I think there's a lot of value in understanding the constraints when approaching a piece of art, and some value in trying to understand what the artist may have attempted without those constraints. But the constraints don't really affect the merit of what the artist did accomplish, only what they felt able to attempt. This feels really similar to me.

sebastos3• 4 years ago

I replied to somebody else farther down along the same lines, but I do think the question of what id -would- have made with modern tools at their disposal is really interesting. Because in a lot of ways, id’s story is partially one of quadrupling down on pushing the engine forward. With quake, they hit another local maximum where the look and feel of the game meshed really well with the new engine capabilities. But then after that, one could argue that they had a slow descent into games looking better but at the same time worse. I would almost go as far as to say that it was a good thing that they were limited as they were, because it pushed them into something that looked so, so cool.

If you think about it, there are many artistic media that are extremely limiting. I mean, consider literal paint! The way that we receive art is surprisingly dependent on that limitation. Once upon a time we were painting on cave walls with crappy dyes. The tools and the painters kept getting better and better, and by the 17th-19th century you have masters contributing some of the most important art of all time. And then, all of a sudden, when we arrive in the 20th century we get color photos, and photoshop, and it’s all somehow _too powerful_. The Mona Lisa done in PS just isn’t the same. And I think it’s more than nostalgia that makes me say that.

stared• 4 years ago

I agree. I mean, I love this project as a proof of concept. It runs, it works. It is interesting to see an imp's fireball casting my shadow on a wall.

At the same time, visually it falls in an uncanny valley. As you notied, Doom is polished to its edge. Or in other words, it is in a local optimum. Any small changes (in graphics or gameplay) are unlikely to improve it.

That said, it is clearly prossible to make high-quality remakes.

I recommend a lot Black Mesa: Xen, also using Ray Traciing. It goes way beyond higher res textures, more detailed models, or just ray tracing. It bring a stunning experience! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAIJich73NY

gentleman112• 4 years ago

Ray tracing in quake 2 also looks worse. The games have very good lighting baked in and aren’t designed for ray tracing realistic lighting - it throws the colour pallet and focal points out

Shorel• 4 years ago

You can take the original DooM, and the super advanced ray-traced DooM, and for each pixel make an average of both, and it will look better than either of them.

At least that's what I get from this demo.

paulryanrogers2• 4 years ago

As a one time Doom modder in the mid-90s I agree the lighting feels out of place. Even most modern renderers in software don't look the same as CRTs over VGA. They're all too bright and often washed out. Tuning contrast and brightness only help so much.

oweiler• 4 years ago

Have you played Brutal Doom?

blarg1• 4 years ago

Been waiting for someone to do this for a while. Really want to see this section in e1m2 https://youtu.be/lNT0fHva724?t=62 raytraced. That place really scared me when I was a kid.

dehrmann• 4 years ago

I realized I've basically only played e1m1. Might explain why I enjoyed UT more than FPSes with storylines.

smrtinsert• 4 years ago

Can't initialize ray tracing engine. Had to install some old vcruntime dist to get even that far.

convery• 4 years ago

From looking at the trailer, some of the scenes kind of seem 'worse' from an art perspective. Not sure how to put it, kind of like when a cartoon includes some live-action art / 3D model or just cheap CGI in general, just feels 'off'. Still, great job by the devs.

zamadatix2• 4 years ago

Yeah, a bit like sticking the newest, biggest, fanciest engine you can find in the 30 year old car in your garage without any doing further modifications as part of it. Sure, the engine itself is impressive... but the car as a whole is now so unbalanced and hacked together it is worse off than before you messed with it.

ruined• 4 years ago

Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to raytrace doom, but take it from this old code monkey, I've spent my entire adult life in dm-1, and a program like this one can do more harm than good.

If you only develop one part of your renderer (and that's all a single exercise like raytracing is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for artefacts down the road. I've seen it a hundred times.

It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine.

Raytracing basically only renders the shadows and to some extent, transparency. What you really want to do is redevelop your entire graphical pipeline, all the major visual assets (models, textures, uv maps, particles, rigging and animation) at the same time, over the course of a release. And don't forget your level design!

I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with raytracing, rendering, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make.

But do it right, okay?

My advice, find a good project, with qualified developers who will assign issues to you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for sick graphics. Thirty to 45 hours a week, eleven months a year, is all you'll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is).

And don't worry about being embarrassed or not having dependencies installed the first time you clone the repo. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very slowly after lots of trial and error you will finally just look it up on youtube.

Now get out there and do it!

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

There's not enough information in the original maps to truly exploit all the features of a raytracing and global illumination engine. None of the textures have normal maps for example, so all of those beautiful bricks and such look flat as a board. Lighting was only defined ambiently at the entire sector level (think shapes on the map) so there's no information on light source locations, direction, spread, etc. So you're really just left with some fancy dynamic lighting and shadows--which IMHO still looks pretty cool (love the shadows and green glow as a BFG ball whizzes by) but yeah it doesn't look anything like a game designed with these features in mind from the start.

polk• 4 years ago

It's applying next-gen lighting techniques to a game without lights.

thanatos519• 4 years ago

That's what I like about Crispy Doom: everything's all authentically pixelly!

nomilk2• 4 years ago

Technical breakthroughs don't seem correlated to enjoyment, at least not in the short term. My favourite game still has 700 AD graphics and no sound effects, at least until someone blunders.

ant6n• 4 years ago

700 AD graphics

What’s that, some board game from the dark ages?

nomilk2• 4 years ago

Indeed. Although the 'modern' variant is only a few hundred years old it's based on the same graphics as its predecessors, which date back as early as the ~5-700's.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Milestone...

wongarsu• 4 years ago

Many people enjoyed the original Doom, and that was a technical breakthrough (first real-time 3d engine with non-orthogonal surfaces). Of course adding raytracing to Doom doesn't add much enjoyment, you'd have to redesign the game to exploit raytracing to achieve that. And Super Mario or a game of Poker with friends might still be more enjoyable than that, but there's room for different categories of enjoyment

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

My highly sophisticated game from the 1970s used 'A' for armies, 'B' for battleships, etc.

pedrogpimenta3• 4 years ago

Okay.

anthk9• 4 years ago

VMS empire?

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

Yes, although in the 1970s it was PDP-10 Empire.

0des2• 4 years ago

Hang on a second, somehow I got redirected to Ars's WordPress path, which didn't respond but it made me think for a minute, how is Ars run on WordPress?

I guess I expected them to have their own thing, I don't know. WordPress just seems so.... I don't know the word, maybe pedestrian? Is that harsh?

pedrogpimenta3• 4 years ago

I don't know if using WordPress is pedestrian but thinking that is pedantic, for sure.

0des2• 4 years ago

What's this have to do with children

Razengan• 4 years ago

Why the hell does clicking on the screenshots take me to an ad? Does this happen to anyone else?

iPhone Safari

I guess it has to do with those annoying behind-content ads that the tap is somehow going through to.

mcbuilder• 4 years ago

I wonder if the ray tracing will help with my nausea. DOOM engine is one of those "nope" games, that I discovered when I was like 11 and playing Chex Question CD I got in the cereal box. For me it's very engine specific: DOOM makes me feel ill, Quake fine. Source blargh, but can play CS all day on HL 1 engine.

andrewf3• 4 years ago

Doom can make me nauseous, especially if I'm watching instead of playing. So does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury (an anachronistic indie game using Duke3D's engine)

Theories: Doom's 35fps framerate cap; try an "uncapped framerate" port like GZDoom. Another thing could be the pseudo-3D look up/down used in many software renderers of that vintage; the world is skewed rather than rotated, so that vertical walls remain vertical when projected onto the viewport. Modern 3D-accelerated ports don't do this. (Or you could turn lookup/down off)

Neither theory explains Source nausea, unless perhaps you also played it with a low framerate.

Moru• 4 years ago

There's a number of settings that help some people. Try changing Field of View to a smaller value and turn off walk-bobbing if there is any. Some can only play in window mode, others need full screen. Low framerate might be a problem too.

WithinReason2• 4 years ago

Might have to do with movement speed

riztaak• 4 years ago

Reminds me of application which was bread and butter of the company. Whole application was 25K+ line of c++ code written as just one c++ function :), an ISAPI extension. It was crazy fast as a webapp and generating lot of revenue for the company so the company keep on investing in it by adding more and more features. Doing any change in that app was months of effort.

tekni5• 4 years ago

I played a bit of it, it's pretty interesting parts look really good while others not as good with a bunch of bugs here and there. I think I still prefer the original graphics, but with more development and tweaking this could be a good way to replay doom.

I recorded a little of gameplay on max settings, it brings my 2080 ti down on rare occasion with 2 light pass, I also did the optional DLSS it offers, not sure if that does anything to performance: https://youtu.be/61x-AKLRoFo

simulate-me• 4 years ago

The part starting at 1:51 where there are demons up on the ledge running back and forth casting shadows was pretty cool.

sgillen• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks this actually looks pretty good? Maybe it’s because I did not play the original doom when it came out.

spion• 4 years ago

I played the original and likewise like it. I think it adds a nice twist to the old familiar levels I fondly remember from the past. I don't think its mind blowing or anything but it seems like a fun new "flavor" to try.

IE6• 4 years ago

I agree. I really liked some of the "UI Enhancements" the ports of Doom to a more modern engine brought and on the surface this looks very similar but I am sure it feels a lot different (since its ray tracing and not just fancy lighting). I'm excited to try it!

anthk9• 4 years ago

Will it work with the Freedoom IWAD?

bayesian_horse• 4 years ago

The size of devices able to run doom shrinks every two years?

_joel• 4 years ago

Carmack's Law

sydthrowaway• 4 years ago

Looks yawn. Just feed all the textures into a GAN already.

drawingthesun• 4 years ago

I kind of like this, I feel that it has a sort of realism that probably doesn't translate into a fun game, but showcases perhaps what these scenarios would actually look like.

The lighting moves around so fast shifting from dark to light as energy balls and fireballs are thrown around it is hard to track where the enemies are and it's frustrating but perhaps this is what such a chaotic event would look like?

_dain_• 4 years ago

See also, Half-Life Raytraced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsteDE8h6jc

Looks beautiful.

marcodiego• 4 years ago

Does it requires too beefy hardware?

valgaze• 4 years ago

DLSS & ideas like it outside an idea are really interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling

Ex. run the base game at an insanely crummy/low resolution. On low(er) it’s possible to run a model to kinda “upscale” in each frame in a performant way.

Or even this CNN initiative from Intel where they took Grand Theft Auto & “painted” it with dashcam footage from rural Germany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0

The results are pretty interesting— all “brown” southern CA mountains were green like in Germany

busterarm• 4 years ago

This needs its own megawad of levels designed to take advantage of the new lighting features. There are so many cool things that they could do with this.

justsomehnguy2• 4 years ago

While others are said enough, the best thing I learned from this article is what author also made Serious Sam ray traced mod[0] and it really looks awesome both because SS was a full 3D game and because it was made with a good light decisions in the map design which really benefit from the ray tracing.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFUwx8zLKfE

“Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

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