Doom 2 Modded With Ray Tracing? Oh Hell Yeah!

Last week Doom fans got a nice surprise when Doom and Doom II got upgraded with a re-release that brought several quality-of-life improvements to these classic titles. However, there was one modern update that was missing -- ray tracing. Well, that’s no longer the case after Shirokii released a mod that includes realtime path tracing for Doom II.

According to the release announcement posted on Mod DB, “realtime path tracing 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.”


This mod uses the RTGL1 renderer previously utilized to bring ray tracing to other classic titles such as Half-Life, Quake 1 and Serious Sam TFE. However, it goes a step further by adding several new features, including support for NVIDIA DLSS3, AMD FSR3, HDR monitor support, particle-based fluids (for the blood), and performance tweaks. There’s also experimental support for RTX Remix.

The end result is stunning, with enemies and locations imparting a more ominous feeling. Seeing a set of lights on the ground partially illuminate a hallway that is mostly covered in blood will certainly stop someone in their tracks. Moreover, seeing a character’s reflections in a mirror is equally as impressive.

It looks and feels like a completely different game with this new mod, which might not sit well with purists who want the original experience. However, for those who feel the changes go too far it’s possible to easily switch back and forth between this new mod and the original look. For download and installation instructions, click here.