Dazzling Doom 2 mod upgrades the legendary FPS with full-blown ray tracing, looks hellishly good

YouTube

Everybody knows that Doom 2 is better than the original Doom. I mean, the double barrelled super shotgun and the Icon of Sin? I rest my case. The legendary FPS has just got even better courtesy of a fantastic new mod that introduces real-time, path traced ray tracing to the game, transforming the look of its hellish halls, infernal environs, and nightmarish demons.

Created by the talented modder shirokii Doom 2: Ray Traced can be downloaded right now for free. Speaking in the release notes of the mod, shirokii states that introducing "real-time path tracing" to Doom 2 "allows shadows, reflections and global illumination without any prebaking. Everything has a shadow. Emissive maps contribute to lighting. Volumetric lighting is traced to simulate a dense atmosphere". Impressive.

Doom 2: Ray Traced image showing cacodemon about to fire a ball of lightning at the gamer — The cacodemon lightning ball attacks now light the beasts up internally before illuminating them externally. Cool! (Image credit: shirokii)

The result of this real-time path tracing means that mirrors and glass actually refract and reflect light, leading to some very atmospheric new looks for the game's classic environments and characters. I'm particularly impressed with how the Cacodemons' lightning ball attacks illuminate the demon's internals, as well as how bright and fierce Imp fireballs are, streaking through the dark.

So how is this lighting wizardry achieved? shirokii notes that by default Doom 2: Ray Traced uses the RTGL1 renderer that was previously used in: Half-Life 1: Ray Traced, Quake 1: Ray Traced, PrBoom: Ray Traced, and Serious Sam TFE: Ray Traced. However, shirokii has gone further than these mods, upgrading the renderer by introducing particle-based fluid simulation for blood (this means blood can now cake the environments dynamically), as well as support for Nvidia DLSS3 Frame Generation, AMD FSR3 Frame Interpolation, HDR monitor support, simple height maps and various performance tweaks. Doom 2: Ray Traced is also compatible with RTX Remix.

Doom 2 with ray tracing enabled showing Imps attacking the player with fireballs. — Shredding demons in Doom 2 never looked better. (Image credit: shirokii)

Overall, it's an incredibly impressive feat, and something that shirokii should get plenty of credit for. Yes, from a purist's point of view, the game you play in Doom 2: Ray Traced feels markedly different from the original, but considering you can switch between the game's classic look and new, ray traced graphics at will by simply pressing the 'C' button, there's really no downside to trying out this great new mod in my opinion. Chapeau shirokii, chapeau.

TOPICS

Rob is editor of PC Gamer magazine and has been PC gaming since the early 1990s, an experience that has left him with a life-long passion for first person shooters, isometric RPGs and point and click adventures. Professionally Rob has written about games, gaming hardware and consumer technology for almost twenty years, and before joining the PC Gamer team was deputy editor of T3.com, where he oversaw the website's gaming and tech content as well its news and ecommerce teams. You can also find Rob's words in a series of other gaming magazines and books such as Future Publishing's own Retro Gamer magazine and numerous titles from Bitmap Books. In addition, he is the author of Super Red Green Blue, a semi-autobiographical novel about games and gaming culture. Rob loves riding motorbikes, too.