DOOM Eternal is almost here. Scheduled to hit PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Google Stadia on March 20th (while Nintendo Switch users will have to wait some time), the sequel to 2016's DOOM earned our Most Anticipated Shooter of 2020 title.

　　The game will be the first one powered by the id Tech 7 engine. In a recent video interview with IGN, id's Lead Engine Programmer Billy Khan discussed those improvements, including the quadrupled maximum frame rate on PC.

　　DOOM is all about having lots of effets and explosions, so our particle system was majorly improved, we have now more particles running on the GPU and taking advantage of the prowess of all the computing power we have there, which allows us to have bigger explosions, more environmental particle effects, more embers, more atmospheric volumetrics, all running at 60Hz.

　　Speed is one of the most important things when playing a DOOM game, so that takes a lot of effort from all departments. On the id Tech 6, we maxed out at 250 frames per second, but in DOOM Eternal with the right hardware you could hit a thousand frames per second, that's the max we have. There's really no upper limit, I've had some hardware here locally that we've built just for testing where we had scenes running in the 400 frames per second. People that have 144Hz or above monitors, even the new monitors that you'll see coming out going forward, DOOM Eternal will hold up for many years and it will give you really amazing opportunities to leverage that hardware. I'm really confident that you'll be happy.

　　Khan also said that DOOM Eternal features greatly improved CPU optimization, which should also future-proof both the game and the engine it runs on.

　　We have made great strides on the CPU front. id Tech 6 was very parallel, all the cores on the CPU were used, but there were still troubles. There were still gaps of latency. We rewrote our jobs system and now we use all of the cores more efficiently. id Tech 7 will scale with the hardware that you have, all the way from very old hardware to the newest that may not even be in the market yet, which is exciting because it gives us future proofing of the engine.

　　The developer concluded the interview with a tease that id Software has 'big plans' for next-generation consoles, though we'll have to wait and see what exactly those are. Maybe they'll include raytracing, which is being explored right now for post-launch support.