Doom Eternal Runs At 1,000 FPS On Liquid Nitrogen-Cooled PC

[Nergal]

 

 

 

Expert overclockers have succeeded in running Doom Eternal at a staggering 1,000 frames per second by assembling a complex computer processor and freezing it with liquid nitrogen. Doom Eternal released earlier this year as a sequel to 2016's Doom, itself a reboot of the iconic shooter franchise from the early '90s. As has been encouraged by the developers, fans have been pushing Doom Eternal's limits since it came out.

The recent Doom games have put a tremendous focus on speed. A key part of any successful strategy in Doom Eternal revolves around navigating the map as swiftly as possible, nimbly dodging energy blasts and rending claws from the savage demons that are out for the Doom Slayer's head. To that end, much of the game's development went into making the game run as smoothly as possible. Billy Khan, id Software's Lead Engine Programmer, boasted that the game could even run at 1,000 frames per second with the right hardware. It was a bold claim, and a purely hypothetical one; the "right hardware" would be all but impossible to achieve in real life.

Or so Khan thought at the time, but community manager Lukasz Lesniewski thought differently. As he describes in a post to the official Bethesda Slayer's Club, Lesniewski challenged Polish hardware retailer x-kom to live up to Khan's lofty claims and run Doom Eternal at 1,000 fps. The challenge was met by x-kom's head of R&D Marcin Rywak and a tech blogger named Piotr Szymanski. The duo assembled a veritable monster of a PC using parts from several other devices. These included an eight-core Intel processor, a HyperX Predator memory card, and a powerful ASUS RTX 2080Ti graphics card. In order to deal with the massive amounts of heat generated by their creation, Rywak and Szymanski liberally poured liquid nitrogen over the machine. The effort was immense, but the results spoke for themselves; Rywak and Szymanski recorded frame counts as high as 1,014 on their device.