Doom port runs entirely on your GPU — no rip-and-tear wear on your CPU

It seems the influx of ever-ambitious Doom ports is never-ending. Yesterday, the existence of a project called “doomgpu” from jhuber6 on GitHub came to our attention, not long after we covered a separate Doom port for quantum computers dubbed Quandoom. The doomgpu port is much different and quite interesting for those interested in seeing how GPUs can be pushed toward non-graphics compute workloads. This port of Doom using the doomgeneric interface can be run entirely on a GPU under Linux so long as you have the LLVM C library for GPUs.

While the initial testing was done with an AMD GPU, the RX 6950 XT, and some coverage emphasizes that aspect, it’s worth noting that this project should work on Nvidia GPUs, too. According to the original creator, “This implementation works on NVIDIA as well as AMDGPU. To use the Nvidia implementation, perform the same steps but with the nvptx loader and make target.”

The rest of the guide is geared toward AMD GPU users, and the listed requirements are as follows: Linux, a GPU with ROCm support, an ROCm or ROCR-Runtime installation, SDL2 libraries, and finally an LLVM build off of the main branch. At the time of writing, the LLVM20 build was used. Using the clang compiler, jhuber6 successfully built and ran Doom with single-threaded game logic (the other rendering is multi-threaded) off their Radeon RX 6950 XT. The specific version of Linux used was Arch Linux with kernel version 6.10.5. Still, the officially listed requirement is Linux in general, so it’ll probably work fine on any standard x86-geared Linux distribution.

Unfortunately, we only have a screenshot of doomgpu in action, not a video. This, and the lack of some additional documentation, means that we currently don’t actually know how well the game runs under these conditions and what kind of performance users can expect. Based on the screenshot provided, the game does at least work well enough to allow some progress into the first few missions without breaking the game or its effects.

Is this a practical port? Absolutely not. The aforementioned quantum computer port isn’t all that practical, either. But it does go to show just how much the general compute power of our GPUs has progressed over the years. However, the screenshot also indicates the AMD RX 6950 XT is being pushed to 99% utilization at a mere 1280 x 800 internal resolution.