Doom: The Dark Ages is a big deal. Not only is it the first return to the rebooted franchise in half a decade, it also marks the debut of id Software's latest engine: id Tech 8. As a company, id Software is defined just as much by its gameplay as it is its technology, and id Tech 8 shows why. It's a gorgeous display of what a next-gen gaming experience should look like, with highly scalable implementations of texture streaming and ray tracing to accommodate a wide range of hardware.
It's remarkable just how much hardware Doom: The Dark Ages can accommodate, too, considering how much complexity is packed into the engine. There are problems, particularly with 8GB graphics cards. But id Tech 8 is still a brilliant showcase of next-gen gaming technology, all wrapped up in one of the bloodiest rides id Software has ever taken players on.
You can now play Doom in a Microsoft Word document, because no app is too sacred
Just remember to delete it before you submit your report.
Doom: The Dark Ages will use as much hardware as is available to it
id Tech 8 is scalable to accommodate your hardware
Look at the image above. These are three identical screenshots taken at 1080p without any assistance from upscaling or frame generation. I took the same shot on three different systems: two desktops, one with an RTX 4060 and another with an RTX 5090, and Asus ROG Flow Z13, which uses integrated graphics through the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip. The quality of the gun model is more or less the same between the RTX 4060 and RTX 5090 PCs, but there's a significant drop in quality on the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. What's interesting is that all three shots above were taken with identical settings.
That provides a good glimpse behind the scenes of id Tech 8. Similar to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which used a modified version of id Tech 7, Doom: The Dark Ages has a robust texture streaming system running in the background. I've played the game across these systems for close to 10 hours total, and I never noticed any pop-in. The differences in texture quality, regardless of your settings, will largely come down to what your hardware is capable of.
Doom: The Dark Ages scales down its Ultra Nightmare graphics settings on lower-end hardware, but it also scales up its Low graphics settings on high-end hardware. You can see an example of that above. Testing the Low, High, and Ultra Nightmare graphics presets on the RTX 5090, I'm struggling to see any difference in quality, even when looking at the images on a 42-inch 4K monitor from six inches away.
The goal with previous Doom releases, and presumably with Doom: The Dark Ages, is for the game to run at a minimum of 60 fps without a clear drop in visual quality. There are a lot of ways that id Software hides what's going on behind the scenes, from seemingly complex background environments that are so far away that you'll never notice the low-quality models to a healthy dose of film grain and chromatic aberration. But they come together to provide an experience that feels the same across different levels of PC hardware, with differences that are hard to notice unless you're doing a side-by-side comparison.
Still, there are differences. Above, you can see the difference between the Low and Ultra Nightmare graphics presets on the RTX 4060. The differences mainly show up in the depth of the image, from ambient occlusion to the fog of war floating around. Still, that's not a massive jump in image quality considering we're spanning five graphics presets.
Ray tracing is a requirement
If you don't have a GPU with ray tracing hardware, you're out of luck
It doesn't matter what settings or resolution you're running at, you need a GPU with dedicated ray tracing hardware to play Doom: The Dark Ages. That means at least an RTX 20-series or RX 6000 GPU (id Software calls for a minimum of an RTX 2060 Super or RX 6600). There isn't an option to turn ray tracing off in the graphics menu, and that's because the lighting system in id Tech 8 relies on ray tracing. You're getting ray-traced reflections, similar to Doom Eternal. But the big addition is ray-traced global illumination.
In the screenshot above, you can see how different the gun model looks when taking just a few steps. In both images, the sun is hidden behind a large building that you can't cross, but the spillover light is enough to turn the metal on the barrel from almost pure white to a dark gray. Unfortunately, I can't do any side-by-side comparisons with ray tracing on and off because there's no way to turn off ray tracing. Hopefully a cheat table will come out shortly after launch to unshackle the console, maybe allowing you to turn off ray tracing. I wasn't able to do it during my testing time, however.
Eventually, Doom: The Dark Ages will support full path tracing, similar to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. It's not available at launch, though.
Massive environments and interactivity, a first for Doom
This is a dark world of death that feels brimming with life
About an hour into Doom: The Dark Ages, I ran past a barrel and noticed something: it had fallen over. For the first time ever, you get destructible environments with Doom: The Dark Ages. Of course, there are barrels and vases scattered throughout the environment that you can destroy by running past them, but there are also larger structures from banisters to tables that you'll rip apart as you tear through a horde of demons. Finishing a battle feels similar to Control, where you take a breath and take in the chaos you brought to the environment.
These elements don't just disappear into a puff of smoke, either. In the video above, you can see this fun room I stumbled upon that was stacked with barrels. Sure enough, I was able to run in and knock everything down. I don't know about you, but that's exactly the kind of lizard-brain antics I'm looking for out of a Doom game.
The environments are interactive, but they're also massive. I didn't realize just how guided Doom and Doom Eternal were until jumping into Doom: The Dark Ages. One of the early missions in the game, Siege I, takes you to a huge battlefield with multiple arenas you need to tackle. You'll fight literally hundreds of demons across the sprawling field, with several dozen on screen at once, and I can't recall any single level in Doom or Doom Eternal that was capable of such scale.
CPU bottlenecks, VRAM limitations, and frame generation
Low-end hardware will need to perform a balancing act
id Tech 8 is seriously impressive, but Doom: The Dark Ages isn't free of issues. I'm rounding CPU bottlenecks, VRAM limitations, and frame generation up into one category here because they all work together. First, the bottlenecks. Across both the RTX 5090 and RTX 4060 systems, I was running into a slight CPU bottleneck. This is very easy to see directly within the performance overlay available in the game, which you can see in the screenshot above. The frame time for the CPU is slightly higher than the GPU; you have a CPU bottleneck. That's despite the fact that I was running a Ryzen 9 9950X at 1080p with Ultra Nightmare graphics and no upscaling.
That was true even up to 4K with the RTX 5090. Above, you can see another scene where the frame time for the CPU is higher than the GPU. Once again, I'm running at Ultra Nightmare graphics with no upscaling, and I even increased the texture pool size to its maximum. Basically, I put as much pressure on the GPU as possible to get rid of the CPU bottleneck, but yet it's still there. Granted, this isn't an extreme bottleneck, but there's some performance of the GPU that's being limited by the CPU. I'm also running with two high-end CPUs here. You may have issues with lower-end chips.
Thankfully, there's an easy way around a CPU bottleneck in Doom: The Dark Ages, and that's frame generation. Both DLSS Frame Generation and FSR 3 are available, both of which significantly lower your CPU utilization. Even when running at 4K with DLAA on the RTX 5090, I've resorted to using DLSS Frame Generation. It's the only way to push performance into triple digits, as lowering graphics settings or turning on DLSS Super Resolution only makes the CPU bottleneck more extreme.
And that finally brings us to VRAM. Above, you can see the performance overlay with the RTX 4060 at 1080p with DLSS Frame Generation on and off. Turning on the feature sucked down a healthy 500MB of VRAM, which is an issue considering this 8GB GPU is already fully saturated from the game. The only way I was able to get below the VRAM required was to lower the graphics settings to Low and set the texture pool to its minimum setting, and that's before factoring in the extra VRAM hit from frame generation.
The bad news is that you'll need to perform a balancing act with the settings of Doom: The Dark Ages if you're using an 8GB graphics card. The good news is that the game runs on an 8GB graphics card. Unlike Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where texture streaming demands would crush 8GB GPUs at higher graphics settings, I was still able to get a totally playable experience at Ultra Nightmare with the RTX 4060. I don't think it's the ideal experience, but it doesn't completely fall apart.
Rip and tear through The Dark Ages with the right hardware
Doom: The Dark Ages is a next-gen experience, and it can be taxing on your hardware. But considering how much is going on in this game, it's a technical marvel. id Software has always been known for pushing the technical envelope forward, and The Dark Ages does exactly that. It's a game that's packed to the brim with tech that nerds like me can geek out about, but that never gets in the way of a game that plays smoothly.