Quality presets
You don't need to understand any graphics option to use DUDE. Two settings in the classic Settings > System menu decide everything:
| Quality | What you get |
|---|---|
| Potato | The original 2004 rendering, unmodified. |
| Low | The original look on the new renderers, with light extras. |
| Medium | HDR lighting, ambient occlusion, surface relief, shadow maps. A good choice for laptops and the Steam Deck. |
| High | Adds physically based materials, smoother character outlines and deeper surface relief. |
| Ultra | Adds screen-space reflections and higher-quality shading everywhere. |
| Nightmare | Everything at full quality, including full-resolution shadows and shimmer-free surfaces, for fast graphics cards. |
The second setting is Ray Tracing (Vulkan on a ray-tracing card): Off, On (hybrid ray tracing) or full Path Tracing. It works with any quality preset.
Every individual setting is still there for tinkerers: press F10 for the full settings menu.
Three renderers
Legacy (classic)
The original renderer, kept untouched as the faithful reference. Works on anything that ran DOOM 3.
OpenGL 3
The original look rewritten for modern graphics cards, plus all of DUDE's raster effects. The safe choice for any PC.
Vulkan
The same effects, faster on modern cards, plus ray tracing, path tracing, AMD FSR 2 upscaling and GPU tessellation.
Ray tracing
On graphics cards with ray-tracing hardware (NVIDIA GeForce RTX, AMD Radeon RX 6000 and newer, Intel Arc), DUDE can trace light the way it really travels.
- RTX On (hybrid): ray-traced soft shadows from every light, ray-traced reflections, ray-traced ambient occlusion and global illumination (light bouncing off walls and floors), on top of the regular renderer.
- Path Tracing: all direct lighting is traced too, from every light in the scene at once, then cleaned up by NVIDIA's NRD denoiser. The most realistic look, and the most demanding.
- Volumetric lighting: light shafts and glowing haze from the scene's real lights.
- Animated monsters and characters cast correct traced shadows and reflections every frame.
- Emissive Mode (experimental): glowing panels, strips and screens become real light sources, set up per level in the built-in Light Editor.
Modern effects (OpenGL 3 and Vulkan)
Lighting
HDR rendering, physically based (PBR) materials, screen-space reflections, ambient occlusion (live and pre-baked), contact shadows.
Shadows
Soft shadow maps for room lights and sunlight. The original sharp stencil shadows remain available.
Surfaces
Parallax relief on walls and floors, subsurface skin and flesh shading, soft particles, anisotropic filtering.
Characters
Smoother character outlines through GPU tessellation, GPU skinning, per-bone motion for clean upscaling.
Anti-aliasing
SMAA and FXAA, plus AMD FSR 2 on Vulkan for native-resolution AA or upscaling.
Little touches
Depth of field while reloading, glowing pickups, screens that cast light, sharper menu fonts at high resolutions.
Smooth on modern PCs
- High frame rates: render at 120, 144 Hz or more while the game logic keeps its native 60 Hz, so physics and scripts behave as designed.
- Speedrunner option: DOOM 3's original 62.5 Hz game timing, as in version 1.3.1.
- Variable refresh rate (G-Sync / FreeSync) and a frame rate limiter.
- Faster level loading, with images and sounds loaded in parallel.
- Widescreen done right: the HUD keeps its proportions on wide screens, no extra pack needed.
- Built-in benchmark with average and 1 % low frame times.
Games, saves and mods
- Runs DOOM 3, Resurrection of Evil, The Lost Mission and the full Quake 4 single-player campaign, all from one program.
- For Quake 4, DUDE includes its own rebuild of Raven's particle and effects system, so muzzle flashes, explosions and Strogg effects render on every renderer.
- Savegames: loads saves from retail DOOM 3, dhewm3 and every DUDE 0.9.x release.
- Mods: runs mods made for dhewm3 1.5.5, including ones with custom shaders.
- Controllers: any pad SDL recognises, with ready-made Xbox-style bindings.
- Ultra Nightmare difficulty, unlocked with Nightmare: one checkpoint per level, no manual saves, and your run is erased when you die.
For the technically curious
DUDE is a fork of dhewm3. Doom 3's ARB assembly shaders are translated into one shared GLSL source tree that serves both an OpenGL 3.3 core and a Vulkan 1.4 backend. The ray-traced tiers use VK_KHR_ray_query, ReSTIR DI with a ReGIR light grid, a multi-bounce irradiance cache and NVIDIA NRD (ReLAX). The full feature list, build instructions and design documents are in the GitHub repository.