While it might have been pulled, kicking and screaming into the public's consciousness, ray tracing appears to be the graphics technology du jour, with all manner of games now supporting it, either natively or with a patch or mod after release. In the case of some games, it's years or even decades after release. Following the addition of ray tracing to Minecraft and Quake, we now have a mod that adds ray tracing to the original Doom. And it looks great.
Created by mega-fan modder, DOOM_RTX, this mod adds realistic reflections, refraction, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination, to Doom, lending it a level of realism that still manages to gel with the original artistic design of the game.
Like the Reshade ray tracing post-processing effect that have been doing the rounds on a number of games, the Doom Mod utilizes path tracing, which isn't quite the same as full ray tracing, as it merely focuses on tracing light rays that are on screen, but with a game like Doom, that's less problematic than in later releases and early tests already made it look fantastic
To be able to try out the mod, you'll need a copy of Ultimate Doom, or Doom II. The developer also recommends an Nvidia RTX 2060 as the minimum-spec graphics card to get the game running how you want.
You can download the mod straight from the mod database.
What are some other classic games you'd like to see re-done with ray traced lighting effects?
