DOOM The Darkish Ages Examined: 13 GPUs Benchmarked To Hell And Again

DOOM is again—and it is by no means regarded meaner. DOOM The Darkish Ages is the newest installment in Id Software program’s iconic franchise, which simply launched, bringing with it a brutal mix of medieval mayhem and trendy firepower. Powered by the newest iteration of the id Tech engine, Id Tech 8, this entry trades Mars for darkish fantasy, however retains the brutal fight, steel soundtrack, and silky-smooth efficiency the sequence is thought for.

Naturally, we needed to see the way it runs. We have put 13 trendy GPUs by way of their paces, from mid-range warriors to high-end {hardware}, to learn how properly The Darkish Ages scales throughout a variety of graphics playing cards. Whether or not you are aiming for 1080p excessive refresh charges or pushing for 4K extremely settings, these outcomes will let you know what to anticipate. So, with out additional ado, the explanation you clicked this story — the benchmarks.

DOOM: The Darkish Ages Benchmarks

For testing, we used our trusty Core Extremely 9 285K check platform geared up with 48GB of DDR5 reminiscence working at a scorching 8666MT/s and tuned for low latency. This technique has a recent set up of Home windows 11 Professional 24H2, and the newest graphics drivers for every GPU vendor as of press time. We performed the sport till we discovered an space with notably worse efficiency than the remainder of the sport to that time. It took some time, however we lastly discovered an appropriate candidate at first of Chapter 6, the place there’s a big out of doors battle in a muddy space within the early daylight.

Total the efficiency traits of this recreation are attention-grabbing. You are actually going to wish a variety of GPU horsepower if you wish to push excessive body charges, however you do not really want that a lot simply to play the sport. As such, it scales down properly, nevertheless it additionally scales the visuals up properly, too. The sport is totally gorgeous on our GeForce RTX 4080, nevertheless it’s actually not dangerous trying on any of the playing cards we examined. In truth, for our play earlier than benchmarking, we had been working the sport at 1080p on “Low” settings and located the visuals to be completely acceptable, even on a 4K monitor.

As you will see in a bit, we examined the sport for efficiency utilizing the Medium and Excessive presets. Some readers might object to the truth that we did not check Extremely, Nightmare, or the best “Extremely Nightmare” settings. The reason being just because these settings are usually not truly applied but. You possibly can allow them, but for all however a few the settings classes, they do not even have any impact; nothing above “Excessive” does. The rationale for it’s because Id Software program hasn’t applied the trail tracing performance that will likely be used for the Extremely and above settings. Even with out path tracing, although, the sport appears to be like fairly good.

It additionally runs fairly properly too. This is a frametime graph from one among our check runs the place, as you possibly can see from the Y-axis, the sport is not working at a very excessive body charge. Regardless of that, it is remarkably {smooth}, with completely no hitches or stutters and a comparatively flat line regardless of the middling efficiency. In truth, even when taking part in at round 30 FPS as we did on a few of our checks, the sport stays eminently playable—though to some extent that is right down to the sport’s comparatively languid tempo in comparison with Doom Everlasting or 2016.

For our lower-end GPUs, we set the sport to the Medium preset at 1080p decision, with out upscaling, and performed by way of the courtyard battle in Chapter 6 3 times, recording the whole battle with CapFrameX. We had been cautious to make use of the identical weapons every time and go after the enemy spawns in the identical order.

The RTX 4080 throws off the dimensions a bit, however the takeaway from this graph is that all the pieces right here is eminently playable at 1080p Medium. You may assume, “Properly, I certain hope so,” however keep in mind, this can be a ray-tracing-mandatory recreation; you can not flip off ray-tracing and it’s at all times in use. With that in thoughts, the outcomes listed here are nothing in need of wonderful, as each single card has stable frame-time consistency and a median over 40 FPS. Make no mistake: the sport appears to be like implausible even at these settings, and “Medium” is a substantial improve from “Low.” Take a look at the Radeon RX 6800 XT working proper together with the GeForce RTX 3080 on this heavy RT title.

For our extra succesful GPUs, we examined the sport in 3840×2160 decision utilizing “High quality” upscaling. This implies DLSS 4 Transformer mannequin on the GeForce playing cards, and XeSS on the opposite GPUs. It is essential to keep in mind that whereas XeSS appears to be like excellent—and even higher on the Arc GPUs—it is not fairly producing the identical picture high quality as DLSS 4, so the GeForce playing cards do have a little bit of a picture high quality  benefit right here that is not exhibiting up within the uncooked numbers. Nonetheless, this recreation appears to be like phenomenal at 4K, even AI upscaling from 1440p (which is what “High quality” equates to).

Just a few playing cards begin to actually wrestle right here, and admittedly these playing cards do not actually have the efficiency for 4K gaming. With that stated, the explanation we examined them and never a few of the extra highly effective GPUs (just like the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti) is as a result of they’ve sufficient video RAM. Playing cards with 8GB of video RAM are actually going to wrestle on this recreation, particularly at 1440p and better decision. You possibly can cut back the feel pool setting to assist considerably, however decreasing it under 2048MB actually has some dire results on texture high quality, so we would not advise it.

Clearly, the GeForce RTX 4080 is in a category of its personal right here, however the Radeon RX 7800 XT comports itself very properly, as does the Arc B580. Placing out practically 40 FPS at these settings is phenomenal for a sub-$300 GPU. The Radeon RX 6800 XT had constantly poor body instances compared to different GPUs, however the variance right here (round 20%) continues to be far lower than you will note in most different video games, just like the current Oblivion remaster.

There’s a number of issues to notice right here. Alchemist continues to be horrible on the ability effectivity entrance, Ampere is simply barely higher, and the Radeons make up the center of the pack. Nevertheless, there’s one thing funky happening with Battlemage on this recreation. Identical to with Indiana Jones and the Nice Circle, these GPUs do not appear to have the ability to attain their full potential; the ability consumption of each the B570 and B580 is round 15% under their energy limits. That does imply that they provide exceptional effectivity on this recreation, aggressive with NVIDIA’s power-sipping Ada Lovelace GPUs. We might see a driver replace from Intel that considerably improves efficiency.

And no, it isn’t a CPU limitation, in truth, The Darkish Ages is unbelievably mild on CPUs. Different retailers, like Digital Foundry, have examined with lower-end CPUs and located that even a Ryzen 5 3600 is sufficient to fulfill the sport’s CPU necessities at 60 FPS. Our Core Extremely 9 285K handily outpaces the older Zen chip, however simply to make certain, we additionally examined a number of GPUs on a Ryzen 9 9900X machine and noticed completely no change. You will not have to fret a lot about your CPU on this recreation so long as it is comparatively current.