It appears that the Path Tracing trailer that NVIDIA showcased behind closed doors at CES 2025 has been leaked online. This is an off-screen video, meaning that you won’t be able to tell much from it. Still, this is new in-engine footage from one of the most anticipated games of 2025. So I guess some of you will find interesting, no?
Doom: The Dark Ages will be powered by the latest version of the iD Tech. And, as with the latest Indiana Jones game, it will have support for Full Ray Tracing/Path Tracing.
To be honest, I’m shocked that a fast-paced game like Doom will support Path Tracing. Still, I’m really excited about it. I’m also curious to see whether there will be any major visual differences between the path-traced and the non path-traced versions. So, expect comparisons once we get our hands on it.
Since there will be support for Path Tracing, we can also expect Doom: The Dark Ages to support DLSS 4. So, this is another thing that I’m curious about. How will the game run with DLSS 4 X4? And what about its latency? Will it be playable at 4K with DLSS 4? Ah, so many questions.
Bethesda is planning to release Doom: The Dark Ages in 2025. There’s also a rumor suggesting that the game might come out on May 15th. My guess is that Microsoft will announce the official release date tomorrow.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
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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Def can't wait for this hope they find a sweet spot in terms of gamifcation and atmosphere between 2016 and eternal with this.
Generic and boring
That's the newest Doom games alright!
Remove "Doom" from the name, showcase this, and it would be received as "Generic: the game" from an unknown studio.
MEH.
if even you are not impressed by this "metal messiah" wtf should i a sci fi fan get from it? lol
honestly the aesthetic is stupid, doom is a sci fi game not a medieval fantasy game, but then again what you expect when you put a doom 64 fanboy in charge of the franchise.
And you're the same guy who cries when dev just rehash the same thing over and over. Now you get something different and its still bad. Give me a break.
different? its the same style as doom 64, every game nowadays is medieval fantasy, why make doom medieval fantasy as well?
The original Doom titles had very fantastical/medieval style world designs. It was meant to evoke metal album covers which frequently featured medieval fantasy style artwork. This game honestly looks more "Doom" to me than any of the recent titles. And I think we're still going to see some sci-fi looking structures. Game may take place way in the "past" but it's clearly an advanced alien race or something. Not just running and gunning in basic human castles
nVidia total Domination. AMdead – extinct!
I don't feel like Doom ever needed raytracing of any kind. It already looks good enough as it is. Doom is first and foremost about the gameplay and killing demons. Not graphics. The less stutter, the less FPS drops and the smoother and higher the framerate, the better. Just give me more Doom. That is all.
id's games (and engines) have always served as technical showcases in addition to having strong gameplay. We just don't here about them in that manner as much these days because they stopped licensing out their engine like they used to. This is nothing new for them and I'm glad to see them continuing to push the envelope
You're not obligated to enable all the bells and whistles, so you can expect to run the game at very high frame rates. idtech are masters of optimization, so even if there is some base level of ray tracing that's in use at minimum settings (like there was for the Indiana Jones game IIRC) it'll still run extremely well on low-end hardware.
That's good, because to me, Doom is about setting a standard and maintaining it. If they want to show off the new bells and whistles, sure. As long as that means that people can still have the option to turn it off and play at raster as usual. I have a raytracing card. But I don't think Doom would suffer from being rasterized rather than raytraced if it's an option.
Correct. You also have to keep in mind that they're very likely targeting a steady 60fps on the weak Xbox Series S (especially after Microsoft bought out Zenimax nearly 4 years ago) so it should be a very scalable game in terms of graphics options and performance.
Why so shocked, John?
Quake can be quite hectic as well, and still Quake 2 RTX exists.
What really shocked me was how far Valve is able to push the ray-tracing performance on AMD's RDNA2 architecture with their open-source RADV Vulkan driver on Linux.
With the latest code I gave Quake 2 RTX a shot on the Steam Deck and could maintain a locked 30 FPS with the built-in demos, which run insanely sped-up on purpose.
If anyone wants to run those on their own PCs, just open up the console in Quake 2 RTX and type the following commands:
timedemo 1
demo demo1
demo demo2
Just seems like a waste of tech to be used on a game with such static environments. At least in Indiana Jones there's foliage blowing in the wind showing off PT shadows, etc. but Doom is just a bunch of metal shiny walls with nothing moving around..
Cut the crap ………
What are the minimum/Recommended PC Specs ???????????????
Doesn't look like a leap forward from eternal, though I'm sure digital foundry shills and the establishment gaming media will claim it's the next best thing since chocolate cake.
That said, I enjoyed the previous games and am looking forward to this as well. More of the same is still a good thing when the same was already good.
the style meaning not the setting but the visual style is better than eternal its more dark and realistic and less colorful, also the maps look like they gonna be much bigger this time around.
Agreed. From the reveal trailer, it reminded me of Painkiller / Serious Sam in the open areas…though these are just design choices. Graphics / Visuals technically doesn't look like they are upgraded anything significant.
LOL funny enough I'm reading your comment while eating a chocolate cake…the best thing lol
Thanks, I now have a craving for a slice of good ol' fashioned chocolate cake.
More of the same is NOT a good thing.
I hope they get rid of colorful-ish tone of Eternal and return to dark, grim style of 2016. Also, FFS don't limit ammo capacity and force weak point on demons, at least have an option to somehow turn it off would be nice.
I want dynamic environments with moving machinery and beasts bursting through walls. This is possible now that we have RT.
If you told me this was a DLC for the 2016 Doom, I'd believe you. Nothing here is visually impressive, maybe technically impressive, but I don't care about that. I care about art direction, not graphics.
doom died after doom3 it was the last real idsoftware game ever. bethesda screwed up idsoftware and they made better games when activision was their publisher.
This is more Gothic Quake I than Doom1 or doom'16
…
Can't they just reboot Quake with this same art style but abit grittier & with a new Gothic storyline ~all while being run on idtech 8
Not interested.
We've seen everything Doom can give us since decades already.
Always the same environments, same enemies. Yawn.
And the gameplay will never really evolve to anything deeper than an old boomer shooter.
The very first Doom with mods is more fun than the new Doom games, because you can at least try different environments and enemies, and sometimes even more diverse gameplay.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors TC, The Golden Souls 2-3, Vietdoom, Castlevania Simon's Destiny, Blade of Agony, Ashes 2063, Ascension… All of these are much more interesting.
They're free, run on potatoes, and they take a few megabytes only on your hard drive.
That new Doom will cost maybe $60, need 100 GB of drive space and a RTX 5090, and you'll be bored after 5 minutes.