OG Doom does not support (or need) hardware 3D acceleration. It’s not a polygonal rendering engine.
Relatedly, and probably not to anyone’s surprise, this is why it’s so easy to port to various oddball pieces of hardware. If you have a CPU with enough clocks and memory to run all the calculations, you can get Doom to work since it renders entirely in software. In its original incarnation – modern source ports have since worked around this – it is nonsensical to run Doom at high frame rates anyhow because it has a locked 35 FPS frame rate, tied to the 70hz video mode it ran in. Running it faster would make it… faster.
(Quake can run in software rendering mode as well with no GPU, but in the OG DOS version only in 320x200 and at that rate I think any modern PC could run it well north of 60 FPS with no GPU acceleration at all.)
Oh, I’m aware! It just felt funny that the very first consumer dedicated 3D graphics card prove that poster’s assumption wrong. In any other case they’d be right. In fact, in those days in 1996, there was the SECOND graphics card that had a 3D processor that DID do 2D graphics too, the Sierra Screamin’ 3D (with the Rendition Verite GPU). It was about 2/3ds the cost of the Voodoo 1 (3DFX) even if the Sierra wasn’t quite as fast. You’d buy the Sierra because you wanted dedicated 3D but couldn’t afford a high end 2D card and the high end 3D card.
All this text, yet nowhere its mentioned whether it runs Doom. Clearly the most important thing to run on any device
OG Doom does not support (or need) hardware 3D acceleration. It’s not a polygonal rendering engine.
Relatedly, and probably not to anyone’s surprise, this is why it’s so easy to port to various oddball pieces of hardware. If you have a CPU with enough clocks and memory to run all the calculations, you can get Doom to work since it renders entirely in software. In its original incarnation – modern source ports have since worked around this – it is nonsensical to run Doom at high frame rates anyhow because it has a locked 35 FPS frame rate, tied to the 70hz video mode it ran in. Running it faster would make it… faster.
(Quake can run in software rendering mode as well with no GPU, but in the OG DOS version only in 320x200 and at that rate I think any modern PC could run it well north of 60 FPS with no GPU acceleration at all.)
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say if it can run Quake, it can safely run Doom as well.
The original Voodoo 1 graphics card could run Quake, but NOT Doom. Thanks Obama!
Only because the Voodoo couldn’t do 2D at all - it had a passthrough on the back, so you’d connect your 2D-capable graphics card to it.
Oh, I’m aware! It just felt funny that the very first consumer dedicated 3D graphics card prove that poster’s assumption wrong. In any other case they’d be right. In fact, in those days in 1996, there was the SECOND graphics card that had a 3D processor that DID do 2D graphics too, the Sierra Screamin’ 3D (with the Rendition Verite GPU). It was about 2/3ds the cost of the Voodoo 1 (3DFX) even if the Sierra wasn’t quite as fast. You’d buy the Sierra because you wanted dedicated 3D but couldn’t afford a high end 2D card and the high end 3D card.