By Sebastian Castellanos
Publication Date: 2026-10-06 21:21:00
At this point, getting DOOM to run on increasingly ridiculous hardware has practically become a tradition. This latest experiment goes in a different direction: developer Nikolai Zhivotenko has brought NVIDIA DLSS 5 Neural Rendering to the original 1993 classic through a custom Windows port.
The project, appropriately titled DOOM + DLSS 5, is based on Linux DOOM 1.10 and has been converted into a 64-bit Windows application using a DirectX 12 presentation path. More importantly, this isn’t DLSS 5 somehow being injected into the original DOS executable. The renderer has been substantially modified to provide the additional information required by modern temporal and neural reconstruction techniques.
DOOM itself still renders internally at its original 320×200 resolution, while the resulting image is presented inside a 1280×800 DX12 window. More interestingly, the modified renderer now generates depth, normal, and motion data for every frame, effectively giving a game designed more than three decades ago the G-buffer information expected by considerably more modern rendering technologies.
Zhivotenko has also turned the project into something of an upscaling playground. Separate presentation modes are available for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS 4 Super Resolution using Preset K, DLSS 4.5 using Preset L, AMD FSR 2.2, Anime4K, and simple nearest-neighbor 4x scaling. The DLSS 5…
