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

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

Naturally, we needed to see the way it runs. We have put 13 fashionable GPUs via 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 inform you what to anticipate. So, with out additional ado, the rationale you clicked this story — the benchmarks.

DOOM: The Darkish Ages Benchmarks

For testing, we used our trusty Core Extremely 9 285K take a look at platform geared up with 48GB of DDR5 reminiscence operating 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 most recent 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 acceptable candidate at first of Chapter 6, the place there’s a big outside battle in a muddy space within the early daylight.

As you will see in a bit, we examined the sport for efficiency utilizing the Medium and Excessive presets. Some readers could object to the truth that we did not take a look at Extremely, Nightmare, or the very best “Extremely Nightmare” settings. The reason being just because these settings are usually not truly carried out but. You possibly can allow them, however for all however a few the setting classes, they do not even have any impact. Nothing above “Excessive” does. The rationale for it’s because Id Software program hasn’t carried out the trail tracing performance into the sport that shall be used for the Extremely and above settings.

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

It additionally runs fairly properly too. Here is a frametime graph from certainly one of our take a look at runs the place, as you possibly can see from the Y-axis, the sport is not operating at a very excessive body price. 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 enjoying at round 30 FPS as we did on a few of our checks, the sport stays eminently playable—though to a point that is all the way 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 via the courtyard battle in Chapter 6 3 times, recording your complete 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 would possibly suppose, “Effectively, I certain hope so,” however bear in mind, it is 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 below are nothing in need of wonderful, as each single card has stable frame-time consistency and a mean over 40 FPS. Make no mistake: the sport appears improbable even at these settings, and “Medium” is a substantial improve from “Low.” Try the Radeon RX 6800 XT operating 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 necessary to do not forget that whereas XeSS appears superb—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 displaying up within the uncooked numbers. Nonetheless, this recreation appears phenomenal at 4K, even AI upscaling from 1440p (which is what “High quality” equates to).

Just a few playing cards begin to actually battle right here, and admittedly these playing cards do not actually have the efficiency for 4K gaming. With that stated, the rationale we examined them and never among 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 battle on this recreation, particularly at 1440p and better decision. You possibly can scale back the feel pool setting to assist considerably, however reducing it beneath 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 almost 40 FPS at these settings is phenomenal for a sub-$300 GPU. The Radeon RX 6800 XT had persistently poor body occasions compared to different GPUs, however the variance right here (round 20%) continues to be far lower than you will notice in most different video games, just like the latest Oblivion remaster.

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

And no, it is not 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 couple 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 latest.