Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t run badly on PC, but enforced ray tracing slows the pace

I’m liking Doom: The Dark Ages more than local reviewist Nic does, possibly because spending most of 2024 remoulding my brain to learn Elden Ring has unduly engorged the part that appreciates a good parry-and-riposte. C'est la vie demons, and colleague. There is one issue that bothers me, though: why, of all the games on Bethesda’s production lines, was this chosen to be the next game that follows Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in making ray tracing effects compulsory?

It looks nice enough, and its performance on PC could be a lot worse, considering. But this is Doom, which between the 2016 reboot and Eternal, had become an ambassador for the speedy, low-spec shooter. Living proof that FPS games, even relatively weighty ones, simply feel better when you’re zipzooping around at 100-plus frames per second. No, I’m sorry. They just do. The Dark Ages is at least easier on the ol’ GPU than Indy was, and I’ve had a crack at a settings guide (below) that should give a boost to most rigs, but ray tracing is still a hard requirement that means it won’t even launch on a lot of older hardware.

Doom: The Dark Ages system requirements and PC performance

These tech changes have also produced system specs that make Doom Eternal’s look like an Aldi shopping list. CPU, RAM, and storage requirements are up considerably across the board, and yes, you will need a graphics card with hardware-based RT capabilities; I tried firing up The Dark Ages on a GTX 1080 Ti and was immediately handed an impassable error message.

Doom: The Dark Ages minimum PC specs (1080p/60fps/Low)

• OS: Windows 10 / 11
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X / Intel Core i7-10700K
• GPU: 8GB VRAM; Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super / AMD Radeon RX 6600
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: 512GB or higher NVMe SSD (100GB available)

Doom: The Dark Ages recommended PC specs (1440p/60fps/High)

• OS: Windows 10 / 11
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X / Intel Core i7-12700K
• GPU: 10GB VRAM; Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 / AMD Radeon RX 6800
• RAM: 32GB
• Storage: 512GB or higher NVMe SSD (100GB available)

Doom: The Dark Ages Ultra 4K PC specs (4K/60fps/Ultra)

• OS: Windows 10 / 11
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X / Intel Core i7-12700K
• GPU: 16GB VRAM; Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 / AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
• RAM: 32GB
• Storage: 512GB or higher NVMe SSD (100GB available)

Unusually for a package of pre-release codes, we were also sent early versions of the requisite GPU drivers, namely Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready 576.31 driver - later updated to 576.40 - and AMD’s Radeon Software 25.10.09.01. These should be out by the time The Dark Ages releases on May 15th (576.40 is out on the 12th), so consider these vital as well. Especially where GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards are concerned: I tested an RTX 5080 on the then-current 576.28 driver and saw some nasty artifacting, which vanished entirely with version 576.31.

Outside of this, and a seemingly one-off crash when enabling FSR frame generation, The Dark Ages is built pretty stably. More so, again, than The Great Circle, despite its newer and unproven id Tech 8 engine: I haven’t had any of that game’s crashing or black screen problems, nor its fussy insistence on forcing on dynamic resolution when using certain lower-end GPUs.

I still find it uncool, maaaan, to exclude pre-RTX PCs, though it’s not like The Dark Ages puts a medieval shotgun to your head and forces you to buy a 5090 either. In the opening mission, the most technically challenging I’ve played thus far, the humble RTX 4060 was enough to average 60fps at a native 1080p with the Ultra Nightmare preset engaged. That’s maximum quality with all the ray tracing trimmings, no less. My RTX 4050-powered laptop, which actually skirts under the minimum spec by only packing 8GB of system RAM, could also do 71fps on Medium quality – though that was with help from DLSS upscaling, on Quality mode. Last among the cheap n' cheerfuls, Intel’s Arc B580 scored 56fps at native 1080p on Ultra Nightmare, and that was without any cutting-edge early drivers.

Higher resolutions take their toll, though are also more naturally suited to upscaling. As such, the older RTX 3070 could still hang at 1440p, producing 67fps on Ultra Nightmare with Quality DLSS, while the more VRAM-rich Radeon RX 7700 XT managed 74fps (with Quality FSR in place of DLSS). Further upgrades will also yield the triple figures, as the RTX 4070 Ti demonstrated: using the same settings as the RTX 3070, it averaged a smooth (and reasonably consistent) 110fps.

The 4070 Ti is enough for 4K, too. At this rez, Ultra Nightmare and Quality DLSS yielded 66fps, which climbed up to 104fps using another RTX trick: DLSS 4 frame gen. Naturally, that becomes Multi Frame Generation with an RTX 50 card, allowing the RTX 5080 to go from 85fps at 4K/Ultra Nightmare to 218fps with 4x MFG – and upscaling on Quality mode, in both cases.

Usually, I’d be jumping for joy that a big-money game released in 2025, let alone one with mandatory ray tracing, could get results like these. Especially coming off the back of Oblivion Remastered and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, neither of which are anywhere near as forgiving of cheaper kit. Yet there’s still something disappointing about The Dark Ages’ general performance, which in a way is a victim of id’s own success in assembling fast-running games.

Compared to Doom Eternal, see, The Dark Age’s framerates actually represent a massive slowdown. The extent might vary depending on your CPU as well as your GPU, but on my RTX 4060, reinstalling Eternal revealed it could regularly run at double the new game’s 60fps average at native 1080p. And that’s with ray tracing enabled – switch it off, something you can’t do in The Dark Ages, and it’s closer to quadruple.

I'm aware that I'm whining about big numbers not being as big as big numbers from five years ago, and that the difference might not even be a difference if you're playing on a 60Hz monitor that can't display ultra-rapid framerates anyway. Is the reduction really worth it, though? I’m several hours in and have yet to be wowed by any specific RT effects, as I have been by Cyberpunk 2077’s moody lighting or Control’s impeccably detailed reflections. Full-fat path tracing is coming in a future update, along with DLSS Ray Reconstruction, so more noticeable visual upgrades could still materialise, but then these would cut performance even deeper.

Framerates and GTX cards aren’t the only apparent victims of the ray tracing requirement, either. Steam Deck support looks like it will, at best, need some time: whether it’s The Dark Age’s own tech or another driver problem, it currently fails to launch on the Deck without quickly crashing. There is the scantest smidgen of hope here, mind. Doom Eternal itself has shown that ray tracing can work on Valve's handheld, and - this guy again - Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has just recently earned Steam Deck Verified status, despite barely holding itself together at launch. With some patches and possible Proton compatibility updates, who knows?

Doom: The Dark Ages best settings guide

Dropping the quality toggles should be a viable method for reclaiming Eternal’s sense of speed, except – perhaps because so many of the presets look exactly the chuffing same – there isn’t actually that much performance to be gained from The Dark Ages’ lower settings. Sticking with the RTX 4060 as our guinea pig, that 60fps at 1080p/Ultra Nightmare basically didn’t shift at all on Nightmare, Ultra, and High, while Medium and Low only got the average up to 68fps and 78fps respectively.

These results delivered a warning that lowering just a few individual options wasn’t going to help much, a fear that was confirmed when I started testing their Low settings one by one. Only two of the eleven main quality settings, shadows and reflections, returned an improved average compared to their Ultra Nightmare equivalents, and these were just 61fps and 62fps. Indistinguishable, in other words.

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Instead of cutting these, then, we’re going to scrape together some extra frames primarily though upscaling, along with ditching a couple of lesser effects. Try out the following:

• Chromatic aberration: Off
• Motion blur: Off
• Upscaler: DLSS/FSR on Quality
• Everything else: Ultra Nightmare

...Now that I’ve written it down, that looks an awful lot like the least sophisticated best settings guide of my career. I apologise, for the second time in this article. Still, there’s no sense in piecemeal-lowering settings that won’t improve framerates, and on that note, this config got the RTX 4060 up to 91fps, a healthy 50% improvement over using the Ultra Nightmare preset as it comes. Don’t be shy about enabling DLSS at a lower resolution like 1080p, either – The Dark Ages uses the up-to-date DLSS 4 with its improved Transformer model, so it’s plenty sharp.

Optionally, DLSS frame generation performs well enough to be worth experimenting with. The 2x setting boosted that 91fps average to 139fps, finally getting back in Doom Eternal territory, though conversely you should stay away FSR frame gen. As in Oblivion Remastered, this is unreliably sluggish and jittery, ultimately making everything look worse than without it.

Partly to make up for the appalling shortness of that list, allow me to also point out some settings that should absolutely be left how they are. Chiefly, Present from Compute should always be set to On; disabling it saw my RTX 4060 plummet from 60fps to 40fps, with no practical benefit. I’d keep Resolution Scaling Mode switched off, too, as upscalers will perform the same role – intentionally lowering resolution to keep performance up – with sharper, more visually consistent results than dynamic scaling.