WTF?! With Doom Eternal's release just around the corner, id Software has revealed that their new id Tech 7 engine is capable of pushing the game up to an insane 1,000 fps. Although current-gen hardware doesn't support nor is powerful enough to handle such frame rates, the devs are looking to make Doom Eternal a game worth revisiting down the line for players with high-end setups in the future.
Doom Eternal's demon-slaying at 4K/60fps will be good enough to satisfy most people, however, like the game's 2016 reboot, the focus is on moving and causing carnage as fast as possible.
For the upcoming game, that job will be handled by the id Tech 7 engine, which aside from enabling bigger, vibrant explosions and better particle effects, will also be able to render the game at unprecedented frame rates.
"On id Tech 6, we maxed it out to 250 frames per second. This game, if you have the hardware right, it could hit 1,000 frames per second. That's the max we have," said Billy Khan, id Software's lead engine programmer, in an interview with IGN.
"There's really no upper limit," said Khan, adding that the studio built some testing hardware where they had scenes running at 400 fps. "For people who have 144hz monitors - or even the new monitors that you'll see coming out that are even above that - going forward, this game will hold up for many years, and it will give you really amazing opportunities to leverage that hardware," he continued.
The new engine is also more efficient in CPU core(s) utilization and will scale across a wide range of players' hardware, from very old to the newest "that may not even be in the market," notes Khan, allowing the studio to future-proof the engine and result in "massive improvements" for gamers every time they upgrade their system.