Ray tracing has been around for a minute and we all know that it makes any game that much better. Especially older titles that use static lighting sources that don’t change no matter where you are or what’s happening on-screen. Case in point, here’s 1993’s Doom with full ray tracing support courtesy of sultim-t.
Doom is a vastly different animal with ray tracing enabled. Every projectile is suddenly a light source producing bright glimpses of terrifying demons and zombies (which are all still sprites, of course). Demons that might have been laying in wait but are still perfectly visible in the original are suddenly shrouded in shadow, adding a whole new gameplay element to this nearly three decades old game.
The best part of Doom Ray Traced is that it’s easy to install. Just head to sultim-t’s GitHub page, download the zip file and place the original game’s DOOM.wad file inside the unpacked folder. Then click prboom-plus.exe to run Doom with ray tracing enabled.
Doom Ray Traced is fully compatible with Ultimate Doom, which adds widescreen compatibility and several levels never seen in the original release. However, there are a few caveats. First, Doom Ray Traced is only supported on Nvidia GPUs at the moment. Second, only the first three episodes of Doom have ray tracing functionality, so the rest of the game (and the added levels in Ultimate Doom) will still look as bland as the day they were first released.
On the plus side, the port is fully compatible with a mod for upgraded music and has DLSS support too. Head to GitHub to download the ray tracing upgrade, but remember you will need a legit copy of Doom to make it work.
Minecraft is another game that recently received a ray tracing upgrade on Xbox consoles, but Microsoft immediately took it back when it turned out the preview build featured ray tracing was test code never intended for public release. It looked great while it lasted, though.