Back in March this year, some of you may remember Billy Khan, Lead Engine Programmer at id Software, said that the id Tech 7 engine in DOOM Eternal would be able to run at 1000 frames per second, provided the conditions and hardware were just right. Since then, no one has actually attempted, let alone managed to achieve that magical number. Until now, that is.
Not long after that interview, Lukasz Lesniewski, Community Manager at Bethesda Poland, decided that he would try and hit that theoretical 1000 fps on DOOM Eternal. In order to do that, he also knew that he was going to need some help and there contacted Polish overclocking team, x-kom, to help him with what we now know was his QuakeCon at Home project.
As you can already guess, Lesniewski was successful in running DOOM Eternal at 1000 fps, but now without his set of hurdles. To give a bit of a background, Lesniewski’s setup comprised a 9th generation Intel Core i7-9700K, some really fast HyperX Predator DDR4-4000 RAM, an ASUS ROG Strix 2080 Ti, and a Samsung 512GB EVO Plus NVMe SSD, a 1200W PSU from bequiet!, and last but not least, lots and lots of liquid nitrogen (LN2).
At this stage, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when we tell you that both the CPU and GPU in this endeavour were kept cool with the LN2; Ultimately, the x-kom team were able to push the 9700K to a ridiculous speed of 6.6GHz while the RTX 2080 Ti was made to run consistently at a speed of 2.4GHz. But to reach the 1000 fps mark, the team did something more extreme: they also had to freeze the whole rig.
With the parameters in place, Lesniewski and the x-kom team reached their goal on the second day of testing, with the game’s framerate counter reaching 1006 fps.
You can check out Lewniewski’s blog post about the project on the official Bethesda site. It goes without saying that this will go down in overclocking history as an eternal achievement.
(Source: Bethesda Slayers Club)
