PC Modder brings Raytracing to DOOM 2016 with “Photorealistic” effects

DOOM Eternal’s set to arrive on PC on March 20th, but what if you want to see DOOM with next-generation visuals now? Better still, what if you want to see DOOM with raytracing today? 

An Italian modder called “MassiHancer” has showcased a modded version of DOOM 2016 with raytraced visuals, utilising programs such as Reshade with Pascal Glitcher’s Raytraced Global Illumination shaders to give DOOM 2016 a “photorealistic” appearance. 

MassiHancer has added several new effects to DOOM 2016, such as Global Illumination and improved volumetric smoke, dynamic depth of field, motion blur and colour grading. Looking at MassiHunter’s video below, we can see that these effects all have a significant impact on DOOM 2016’s visuals. 

Sadly, this mod is not available to download at this time. It currently utilises Pascal Gilcher’s RT shaders, which are only available to his $5/$20 Patreon subscribers. On top of this, MassiHancer’s mod is currently in development. In the future, MassiHancer plans to release DOOM 2016’s photorealistic mod with a detailed video tutorial on how to install it. This will likely come after Pascal Gilcher’s RT shaders release out of beta with a few performance enhancements. 

The gameplay footage below was played on a system with an i7-8700K processor and an RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. Even with these high-end specifications, this modded version of DOOM 2016 has some framerate issues. That said, this mod is likely to offer stronger performance when it is ready for release. 

Raytracing game mods aren’t new, but right now MassiHancer’s DOOM 2016 raytracing mod easily stands as one of the best we have ever seen. Even so, the modded nature of this raytracing implementation prevents DOOM 2016 from utilising hardware acceleration for its raytraced elements. This means that this mod cannot benefit from Nvidia’s RT and Tensor cores to accelerate this game’s raytracing implementation.