Doom Eternal new-2

Don’t expect real-time ray tracing effects in Doom Eternal anytime soon


Back in July 2019, we informed you about Doom Eternal supporting real-time ray tracing effects. However, it appears that PC gamers will not be able to enjoy these effects anytime soon. As id Software’s Marty Stratton claimed, Ray Tracing isn’t currently a top priority for the team.

As Marty Stratton told Digital Foundry:

“So we actually haven’t talked about that at all. And we, quite frankly, haven’t spent a ton of time. The team basically did some initial implementation and exploration about a year ago. At that same time, we had so much that we wanted to do with the game still.

Our tech team is the biggest fan of new tech. Som it was a little hard to pull everybody off of that because it was the shiny new toy but when we’re talking about getting the game out there and getting out as close on time as possible and at the highest polish quality, we kinda had to pull back that effort.

It is something that they [tech team] are like literally just about ready to start looking at it again. And they actually have some interesting ideas. I don’t want to go too far down on that path cause who knows what exactly we’ll do. However, there is more that you can use the technology for than just reflections, shadows and the real-time lighting.”

Stratton concluded that id Software has some pretty cool ideas that will both make the game look better, and make it easier for developers to create new ray traced content.

Doom Eternal releases on March 20th!

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