Eventually, the plans for a rendering approach with voxel-based raycasting were abandoned in favor of conventional mesh-based rasterization.
[10] The developers' goals when creating the engine were described as being able to drive good looking games running at 1080p on 60 fps but also reintroduce real-time dynamic lighting which was largely removed from id Tech 5.
[11] The engine still uses virtual textures (dubbed "MegaTextures" in id Tech 4 and 5) but they are of higher quality and no longer restrict the appearance of realtime lighting and shadows.
[14] A technical analysis of Doom found that the engine supports motion blur, bokeh depth of field, HDR bloom, shadow mapping, lightmaps, irradiance volumes, image-based lighting, FXAA, volumetric lighting/smoke, destructible environments, water physics, skin sub-surface scattering, SMAA and TSSAA anti-aliasing, directional occlusion, screen space reflections, normal maps, GPU accelerated particles which are correctly lit and shadowed, triple buffer v-sync which acts like fast sync, unified volumetric fog (every light, shadow, indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering), tessellated water surface (on the fly without GPU tessellation.
[17][18] Bethesda's Pete Hines has commented that while id Tech 6 reuses code written by Carmack, most of the decisions made about the engine's direction were taken after he left.