Is your NPU DOOMed? Quadric's Chimera GPNPU runs every AI model — and a complete DOOM engine. Find out why Quadric is different.
April 6, 2026 -
"But can it run DOOM?" is the universal litmus test for new silicon, and for good reason. The renderer is a real-time system: raycasting, texture mapping, perspective-correct floor projection, dynamic lighting, depth-buffered sprite compositing, palette-indexed shading. It needs branching, pointer arithmetic, trig, irregular memory access, and complex control flow, all under a hard frame-time deadline.
It requires a computer.
The original DOOM engine tells you everything about why this workload is kryptonite for AI accelerators.
Carmack wrote DOOM in ANSI C, with inner loops hand-tuned in x86 assembly. Target hardware was a 386 or 486, machines that often lacked a floating-point unit. The entire engine runs on 16.16 fixed-point integer arithmetic. No floats. No doubles. No FPU. id Software confirmed that DOOM doesn't touch the math coprocessor. Adding a 387 to your 386 did nothing for your framerate.
There are no matrix multiplies in the renderer. Not one. The pipeline is integer adds, shifts, comparisons, table lookups, and the occasional fixed-point multiply. Walls are vertical texture columns indexed by fixed-point coordinates. Floors are horizontal spans with per-row perspective lookups. Lighting is a 256-entry palette remap (the COLORMAP) indexed by distance. Distance calculations skip square roots entirely: Carmack used an octagonal approximation built from absolute values, a comparison, and a shift.
DOOM's computational vocabulary: adds, subtracts, shifts, bitwise ops, comparisons, table lookups, scalar integer multiplies. No GEMMs. No convolutions. No matrix anything. Data-dependent scalar decisions, one after another, through a tight memory access pattern.
If your chip can only do matrix math, this workload will tell you.
For our demo, we implemented a raycasting-based DOOM-style renderer on Quadric. Original DOOM used a BSP-based software renderer rather than pure raycasting, but our version preserves several of the workload characteristics that matter here: irregular control flow, texture sampling, and fixed-point math.
We compiled the renderer as a single kernel targeting the Quadric Chimera GPNPU. Every pixel of a 224×168 frame is computed on-chip, in one shot. No host-side rendering. No frame decomposition across a CPU.
We wrote a renderer that speaks the same language DOOM speaks: integer ALU, computed memory access, data-dependent control flow. Chimera is fluent in all of it. The kernel completes a full 224×168 frame in 560K cycles on QC-N. At silicon clock speeds of 1GHz, that's ~1,785 frames per second. At 3nm, the entire chip runs at under 1W.