Doom on GPU: Running the Cult Classic FPS Without a CPU

A developer has just achieved the ultimate feat: running the legendary Doom almost entirely on a GPU. Yes, you read that right—Doom, the FPS that terrified parents in the ’90s, has finally broken free from the CPU and moved to graphics silicon.

To remind you, Doom is THE first-person shooter game released in 1993 that laid the foundation for the FPS genre. It featured 2.5D graphics that would make Minecraft look like a Pixar movie, an atmosphere darker than a family reunion at the Addams’, and an arsenal that would make John Wick envious.

The project, named “doomgpu,” was crafted by a certain jhuber6 on GitHub. It uses the code from a generic port of Doom, combined with the LLVM C library for GPUs.

So, what does running Doom on a GPU change?

Well, not much, except for speed and the “love of the technical challenge” for its creator.

If you want to try this out (and potentially open a portal to hell in your GPU), here’s the shopping list:

• A Linux operating system
• An AMD graphics card with ROCm support
• SDL2 libraries
• An installation of ROCm or ROCR-Runtime
• An LLVM compilation from the main branch

If you check all these boxes (congratulations, you’re officially geekier than 99.9% of the population), here’s how to summon demons onto your GPU:

make -C amdgpu_loader/ -j
make -C doomgeneric/ -f Makefile.amdgpu -j
./amdgpu-loader/amdgpu-loader --threads 512 ./doomgeneric/doomgeneric -iwad doom1.wad

And that’s it! If all goes well (and you haven’t accidentally opened a portal to a parallel dimension), you should see Doom in all its pixelated glory, running proudly on your GPU like a hamster on steroids in its wheel.

It’s pretty cool to see that, 30 years after its release, Doom continues to inspire developers and push the boundaries of what we thought was possible.

For the curious who want to dive into the demonic workings (or contribute to this crazy project), take a look at the GitHub repository of doomgeneric. Who knows, you might be the next one to port Doom onto… who knows what!