Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A port of DOOM that runs (almost) entirely on the GPU
I've been recently working on porting standard C library functions to work on the GPU https://libc.llvm.org/gpu/. A colleague of mine suggested using it to run DOOM, so that's what I did. It runs on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs and it is completely playable. This works by targeting C code directly for the GPU via cross-compilation in clang, looks something like this https://godbolt.org/z/hh44a6vKr. The LLVM C library will provide the headers, C library functions, and the kernel that calls the main function, so we only need to compile the DOOM source code…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A port of DOOM that runs (almost) entirely on the GPU launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5uygzEmdLw Hi HN, I built a RISC-V emulator that implements the RV32IM instruction set and a minimal syscall interface to run DOOM. A few weeks ago, I got my first output with a simple hello world assembly program. Since then I have been working tirelessly to get DOOM to run. I needed to figure out how to run C programs first, and came across newlib, which allows the underlying environment to implement the syscall stubs one by one until the programs run. I have also added ELF loading, but currently only a single `PT_LOAD` segment is…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Hi everyone, I'm kinda involved in some retrogaming and with some experiments I ran into the following question: "It would be possible to run transformer models bypassing the cpu/ram, connecting the gpu to the nvme?" This is the result of that question itself and some weekend vibecoding (it has the linked library repository in the readme as well), it seems to work, even on consumer gpus, it should work better on professional ones tho
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3D1
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file. I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method. It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and…
2025 · doompdf.pages.dev · its alternatives →
- 4

I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5

Hi there! I've been on-and-off working on TacOS for a few months, which follows some UNIX-derived concepts (exec/fork, unix-style VFS, etc) and is now able to run a port of Doom, with a fairly small amount of modifications, using my from-scratch libc. The performance is actually decent compared to what I expected. Very interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

Hi HN, I’ve been working on Gore – a port of the classic Doom engine written in pure Go, based on a ccgo C-to-Go translation of Doom Generic. It loads original WAD files, uses a software renderer (no SDL or CGO, or Go dependencies outside the standard library). Still has a bit of unsafe code that I'm trying to get rid of, and various other caveats. In the examples is a terminal-based renderer, which is entertaining, even though it's very hard to play with terminal-style input/output. The goal is a clean, cross-platform, Go-native take on the Doom engine – fun to hack on, easy to read,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7KR
I got DOOM running in KiCad by rendering it with PCB traces and footprints instead of pixels. Walls are rendered as PCB_TRACK traces, and entities (enemies, items, player) are actual component footprints - SOT-23 for small items, SOIC-8 for decorations, QFP-64 for enemies and the player. How I did it: Started by patching DOOM's source code to extract vector data directly from the engine. Instead of trying to render 64,000 pixels (which would be impossibly slow), I grab the geometry DOOM already calculates internally - the drawsegs[] array for walls and vissprites[] for entities. Added a…
Nov 2025 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
- 8

An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Calculate token/s & GPU memory requirement for any LLM. Supports llama.cpp/ggml/bnb/QLoRA quantization - RahulSChand/gpu_poor
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10OC
2024 · ludocode.com · its alternatives →
- 11

CUDA is NVIDIA's language for GPU programming, allowing you to mix write CPU and GPU code in C++ in one file. By chaining a few projects that compile CUDA to OpenCL, then Vulkan, then WebGPU, you can experiment with this GPGPU language on any hardware.
2025 · hipscript.lights0123.com · its alternatives →
- 12

We developed a tool to trick your computer into thinking it’s attached to a GPU which actually sits across a network. This allows you to switch the number or type of GPUs you’re using with a single command.
2024 · thundercompute.com · its alternatives →
- 13

A Simple Unix-like operating system. Contribute to ozkl/soso development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 15GC
Hi HN, YC w24 company here. We just pivoted from drone delivery to build gpudeploy.com, a website that routes on-demand traffic for GPU instances to idle compute resources. The experience is similar to lambda labs, which we’ve really enjoyed for training our robotics models, but their GPUs are never available for on-demand. We are also trying to make it more no-nonsense (no hidden fees, no H100 behind “contact sales”, etc.). The tech to make this work is actually kind of nifty, we may do an in-depth HN post on that soon. Right now, we have H100s, a few RTX 4090s and a GTX 1080 Ti online.…
2024 · gpudeploy.com · its alternatives →
- 16WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
- 17

We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing. Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia. Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon. Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo
Feb 2026 · makie.org · its alternatives →
- 18

Hey HN, we wanted to share our repo where we fine-tuned Llama 3.1 on Google TPUs. We’re building AI infra to fine-tune and serve LLMs on non-NVIDIA GPUs (TPUs, Trainium, AMD GPUs). The problem: Right now, 90% of LLM workloads run on NVIDIA GPUs, but there are equally powerful and more cost-effective alternatives out there. For example, training and serving Llama 3.1 on Google TPUs is about 30% cheaper than NVIDIA GPUs. But developer tooling for non-NVIDIA chipsets is lacking. We felt this pain ourselves. We initially tried using PyTorch XLA to train Llama 3.1 on TPUs, but it was rough: xla…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

A pipeline that translates Rust GPU code into formal Coq models, as a foundation for memory model proofs - neelsomani/vericuda
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20

We built installable software for Windows & Linux that makes any remote Nvidia GPU accessible to, and shareable across, any number of remote clients running local applications, all over standard networking.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21TP
This is the inevitable post after jeff_harris released restful-doom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919534 twitch-plays-doom is a Python Twitch IRC->restful-doom proxy to control doomguy with a staggering 8 second delay. The project was Saturday night's 'I wonder if I can make this work' session. Since it's been live there has been a team of four successfully make it to half way through E01M01. I've since added godmode to the chat (you can guess the command). This was fun, hope others get some enjoyment out of it. Twitch Stream/Chat…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 22

TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization:…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23

Janus is a API router for AI models written in Go and has a Vulkan Model runner - Vibra-Ingenn/Janus
22d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Also compare
- I built a RISC-V emulator that runs DOOM alternatives
- Llama 3.1 70B on a single RTX 3090 via NVMe-to-GPU bypassing the CPU alternatives
- Doom (1993) in a PDF alternatives
- I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code alternatives
- My from-scratch OS kernel that runs DOOM alternatives
- Doom port to pure Go – Gore alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →