The Engineering Book: From the Catapult to the Curiosity Rover: 250 Milestones in the History of Engineering

1993

Doom Engine

John D. Carmack (b. 1970)

In 1972, the game Pong appeared and for the first time people could see and play a video game in public. Space Invaders came in 1978, and then PacMan in 1980. All of these games are incredibly simple by today’s standards: 2D sprite graphics with a few colors.

But then in 1993, with the release of a game called Doom, things changed dramatically. Doom was the first FPS (First Person Shooter) game to be played by millions of people, and it made immersive, realistic-feeling 3D environments a desirable feature. John D. Carmack’s “Doom Engine”—the first 3D game engine—made a huge impact. Since then, video games have improved in every way—more realistic, more detailed, faster, with extremely large worlds for players to explore.

From an engineering perspective, the advancements that made this all possible were faster CPUs, and then in 1999 the development of the first Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate the 3D rendering. Since then, the power of the GPU has exploded.

The key concept in a GPU—the shader: small programs that manipulate vertexes or pixels. The GPU’s power is measured in the number of cores it has for simultaneously executing shaders, along with the clock rate, memory available to them, and memory bandwidth. GPUs in desktop machines started with 20 million transistors in 1999 supporting one vertex shading core. Today there are billions of transistors supporting thousands of cores and gigabytes of memory.

Several engineering disciplines have worked together to make this possible. The increase in the number of transistors has been made possible by the engineers working in chip fabrication. The hardware engineers working for GPU companies have radically advanced their chips to take advantage of the transistors. Software engineers have created standards like OpenGL to make GPU access easier. And then the game developers create the games using the standards.

All of this GPU power has been transformative. Automotive racing games are approaching a level where they are indistinguishable from reality. FPS games have realistic worlds so large that they seem infinite. Engineers are creating artificial reality.

Two young people playing Doom computer game on PlayStation video game system by Sony.