Doom: The Dark Ages added path-traced lighting with its latest patch. We tested the game last month and were impressed with the PC port. At launch, Doom featured ray-traced reflections and global illumination (always on). The new update adds path-traced global illumination, reflections, and ray-traced shadows.
| 1080p 60 FPS | 1440p 60 FPS | 4K 60 FPS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics Quality | Medium + Bal Upscale | High + Bal Upscale | Ultra + Perf Upscale |
| Path Trace Settings | RT Shadows Off | All On | All On |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | Intel Core i7 12700K | AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | Intel Core i7 12700K | AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | Intel Core i7 12700K |
| GPU | NVIDIA RTX 4070 | NVIDIA RTX 4080 | NVIDIA RTX 4090 |
| RAM | 32GB | 32GB | 32GB |
| Storage | 100 GB SSD | 100 GB SSD | 100 GB SSD |
- Path-tracing requires a GeForce RTX 4070 as the baseline GPU for 1080p 60 FPS using upscaling.
- QHD 1440p requires an RTX 4080, while 4K demands an RTX 4090.
- The CPU and memory requirements are unchanged.
Doom: The Dark Ages Path Tracing Scaling
Path tracing performance decreases sharply with resolution. The GeForce RTX 4090 averages 115 FPS at 1080p using the “Ultra Nightmare” settings, dropping to 58 FPS using path tracing. That’s approximately half the performance. QHD and 4K are much more intensive:
- 1080p -> Path Tracing: 115 FPS -> 58 FPS (-50%).
- 1440p ->Path Tracing: 91 FPS -> 40 FPS (-54%).
- 4K -> Path Tracing: 64 FPS -> 20 FPS (-68.5%).
Path Traced Global Illumination
Global illumination is the most obvious upgrade with path-tracing. Multi-bounce diffuse lighting drastically improves indoor lighting quality, especially in areas with limited direct light sources. The comparison below highlights how path-tracing illuminates directly occluded surfaces.
Multi-bounce lighting enhances light dispersion, illuminating distant surfaces and casting deeper shadows. It also accounts for light bleeding, as evident on the shotgun below.
Glossy surfaces reflect light, acting as secondary light sources (emissives), further aiding the illumination of surfaces occluded by direct light sources. This results in varying shadow tones that are finer and more precise than ray-tracing.
The rendering of finer, more precise shadowing often enhances geometric detail as more occluded surfaces are illuminated.
Ray Traced Shadows: Sun Only or All
Path-traced global illumination is backed by ray-traced shadows, with separate controls for directional (sun shadows) and artificial (point/spot shadows).
Ray-traced Shadows complement diffuse lighting, rendering finer, layered shadows as cast by direct and indirect lighting. This heightens scene realism, rendering varied shadow tones per the casting light’s intensity.
Ray-tracing dramatically improves the quality of artificial shadows, enhancing silhouette detail and complexity.
Ray-traced shadows subtly impact performance, with sun shadows being the primary contributors. Disabling them improves frame rates by 5-6%.
Transparency & Path Traced Water Reflections
Ray-traced transparency includes transparent particles in the path-traced calculations. This improves color bleeding, especially when produced by artificial light sources like fires, explosions, and other destructive effects.
Path-traced water reflections improve the reflection quality on water surfaces. Interestingly, its impact varies from surface to surface:
- Wet surfaces and puddles get improved color detail, while ponds, streams, and larger water bodies become more reflective.
- Most smooth surfaces reflect more light.
Disabling ray-traced transparency improves frame rates by 15-18%. However, path-traced water reflections hardly impact the performance, perhaps due to their limited use.
Doom: The Dark Ages Path Tracing Performance
Path tracing requires upscaling for playable frame rates, regardless of your specifications. Quality mode boosts frame rates by 95%, balanced by 130%, and performance mode by 180% at 4K.
DLSS Ray Reconstruction improves path-tracing performance by 5-6% on the GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs. Gains might vary from architecture to architecture, with diminishing returns on the RTX 30 and 20 cards.
Regardless, ray reconstruction sharply improves the path-traced lighting quality using temporal feedback guided by the transformer model. The results are prominent across reflections, global illumination, and shadows.
Frame Generation is compulsory for enjoyable frame rates with path tracing. While upscaling gets the GeForce RTX 4090 to (almost) 60 FPS, enabling frame generation yields ~100 FPS. The gains vary from 90% at native 4K to 70% when paired with upscaling.
Doom: The Dark Ages Path Tracing VRAM Usage
Doom: The Dark Ages uses substantially more graphics memory with path-tracing. The increase is relatively mild at 1080p (+2 GB), but becomes more pronounced at 1440p (+2.5 GB) and 4K (+4 GB):
- 1080p -> Path Tracing: 10.6 GB -> 12.5 GB.
- 1440p ->Path Tracing: 11.5 GB -> 14 GB.
- 4K -> Path Tracing: 14 GB -> 18 GB.
The peak VRAM usage increases to 20 GB at 4K native with frame generation. Upscaling brings it down to 13-14 GB, but pairing it with frame generation boosts it to 15-16 GB.
