Bethesda has lifted the review embargo for Doom: The Dark Ages. Powered by id Tech 8, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 576.40, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.5.1 drivers.
id Software has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Lights, Geometry, Water and more. Moreover, the game supports NVIDIA DLSS 4, AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS from the get-go. Plus, there is an in-game setting for DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen.
Doom: The Dark Ages does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, we used the following area. This appeared to be one of the most demanding areas early in the game. It also has a lot of enemies on screen, so it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs. Also note that the game does not support Path Tracing yet. id Software will add support for it via a post-launch update.
Doom: The Dark Ages is mostly a GPU-bound title. Moreover, like Indiana Jones, it uses Ray Tracing for its GI by default. This means that you’ll need a Raytracing-capable GPU to run it.
At 1080p/Ultra Settings, the game run smoothly on almost all of our GPUs. The only GPU that was unable to hit 60FPS was the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti. All the other GPUs had no trouble at all pushing framerates over 60FPS at all times. At 1080p, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT and 9070XT came close to the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 3080 and RTX 5080, respectively.
At 1440p/Ultra Settings, our top five GPUs were able to run the game with over 60FPS. As for Native 4K/Ultra Settings, the only GPU that was able to push 60FPS at all times was the NVIDIA RTX 5090.
As I said, Doom: The Dark Ages has native/in-game support for DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen. Plus, the game uses, by default, the Transformer Model. Thus, you don’t have to mess around with the NVIDIA App in order to enable it. I’m mentioning this because if you force the Transformer Model via the NVIDIA App, the in-game setting for MFG will stop working.
At 4K, the game ran super smoothly with MFG X4. We’re talking about framerates over 260FPS (and sometimes, it could go higher than 300FPS). The game felt really responsive as our base framerate was already quite high. Not only that, but I did not notice any of the visual issues I’ve seen in other games with MFG X4. UI icons do not suffer from flickers while moving the camera. I also did not notice any additional ghosting due to MFG X3 or X4. At least in the areas I tested, MFG appears to be working exceptionally well.
Naturally, I also tried the game at 8K on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. With DLSS 4 Performance Mode and MFG X2, you can get framerates over 60FPS at all times. By upping MFG to X4, I was able to get framerates between 129-134FPS. Input lag was noticeable, especially after gaming at 4K. However, the game was perfectly playable, even during chaotic battles.
Graphics-wise, Doom: The Dark Ages is great. Even without its Path Tracing effects, Doom: The Dark Ages looks amazing. Although id Tech 8 does not have an answer to Nanite, environmental pop-in was kept at a minimum. From what I could see, the pop-ins are not as bad as those we saw in Indiana Jones. All enemies are highly detailed, though the human characters are not as impressive as those of Indiana Jones. The game also has high-quality textures and lots of cool particle effects. In a nutshell, the game looks amazing, but it will not leave you speechless. Things might change, though, when id Software releases the Path Tracing patch.
Before closing, I should note that I did not experience any major stutters. This should please a lot of PC gamers as the game felt smooth during my benchmarks. So, this is another game that uses Denuvo but does not suffer from stutters.
All in all, Doom: The Dark Ages runs amazingly on PC. The game does not require a powerful GPU at 1080p. At 4K, you’ll need the most powerful GPU to run it at native res. This is to be expected as Doom: The Dark Ages uses RT by default. We also did not experience any stutters. Plus, the DLSS 4 implementation is amazing in this title.
id Software will add support for Path Tracing and Ray Reconstruction via a future patch. Once this patch comes out, I’ll be sure to test it!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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