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DOOM ported to run almost entirely on AMD GPUs

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Whatever will they do with DOOM next? A developer at AMD decided to port over classic DOOM to run almost entirely on the GPU. Why? In their own words "Because I can".

From the doomgpu GitHub page:

This is a port of DOOM that runs (almost) entirely on the GPU using the LLVM C library for GPUs based on the doomgeneric interface.

To try it you will need a WAD file (game data). If you don't own the game, shareware version is freely available (doom1.wad).

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.

We've seen DOOM run on basically everything, so why not just a GPU? According to the GitHub page it currently requires a Linux system, an AMDGPU with ROCm support, SDL2 libraries, a ROCm or ROCR-Runtime installation and an LLVM build off of the main branch (LLVM20 as of writing).

How they did it:

The clang compiler can target GPUs directly. We emit a single kernel that calls the 'main' function. Functions that require the operating system are handled through the RPC interface. See my LLVM talk for more information.

This implementation defines the amdgpu-loader utility, which handles launching the main kernel, setting up the SDL2 window interface, and provides functions to get the input keys and write the output framebuffer. Okay, it's not entirely on the GPU, but all the logic and rendering runs on the GPU.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: AMD, FPS, Misc, Retro
21 Likes
About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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2 comments

kit89 Oct 3
That's very interesting from a technical perspective - does it have an impact to performance?

I imagine DOOM is very serial in processing, I don't think it can be easily spread across thousands of cores.
Klaas Oct 3
Quoting: kit89I imagine DOOM is very serial in processing, I don't think it can be easily spread across thousands of cores.
It is completely serial in processing and it is a lot of work to untangle. Just look at the discussions about GZDoom.
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