DOOM The Dark Ages Tested: 13 GPUs Benchmarked To Hell And Back
Naturally, we had to see how it runs. We've put 13 modern GPUs through their paces, from mid-range warriors to high-end hardware, to find out how well The Dark Ages scales across a range of graphics cards. Whether you're aiming for 1080p high refresh rates or pushing for 4K ultra settings, these results will tell you what to expect. So, without further ado, the reason you clicked this story -- the benchmarks.
DOOM: The Dark Ages Benchmarks
| Hardware Used: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (Arrow Lake, 5.7 GHz, 8P+16e-Core) MSI MEG Z890 ACE (Intel Z890 Chipset) 2x 24GB Kingston DDR5-8666 MT/s CUDIMMs Toshiba RD400 512GB Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro x64 (24H2) AMD Radeon Software (25.5.1) NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v576.40 Intel Arc Drivers 101.6793 |
Graphics Cards Tested: AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT 12GB AMD Radeon RX 7600 8GB AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT 16GB AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT 12GB Intel Arc B580 12GB Intel Arc B570 10GB Intel Arc A770 16GB Intel Arc A750 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB |
For testing, we used our trusty Core Ultra 9 285K test platform equipped with 48GB of DDR5 memory running at a scorching 8666MT/s and tuned for low latency. This system has a fresh install of Windows 11 Pro 24H2, and the latest graphics drivers for each GPU vendor as of press time. We played the game until we found an area with notably worse performance than the rest of the game to that point. It took a while, but we finally found a suitable candidate in the beginning of Chapter 6, where there's a large outdoor battle in a muddy area in the early daylight.
Overall the performance characteristics of this game are interesting. You're really going to need a lot of GPU horsepower if you want to push high frame rates, but you don't actually need that much just to play the game. As such, it scales down well, but it also scales the visuals up well, too. The game is absolutely stunning on our GeForce RTX 4080, but it's really not bad looking on any of the cards we tested. In fact, for our play before benchmarking, we were running the game at 1080p on "Low" settings and found the visuals to be perfectly acceptable, even on a 4K monitor.
As you'll see in a bit, we tested the game for performance using the Medium and High presets. Some readers may object to the fact that we didn't test Ultra, Nightmare, or the highest "Ultra Nightmare" settings. The reason is simply because those settings are not actually implemented yet. You can enable them, yet for all but a couple of the settings categories, they don't actually have any effect; nothing above "High" does. The reason for this is because Id Software hasn't implemented the path tracing functionality that will be used for the Ultra and above settings. Even without path tracing, though, the game looks quite nice.
It also runs quite nicely too. Here's a frametime graph from one of our test runs where, as you can see from the Y-axis, the game isn't running at a particularly high frame rate. Despite that, it's remarkably smooth, with absolutely no hitches or stutters and a relatively flat line despite the middling performance. In fact, even when playing at around 30 FPS as we did on some of our tests, the game remains eminently playable—although to some degree this is down to the game's relatively languid pace compared to Doom Eternal or 2016.
For our lower-end GPUs, we set the game to the Medium preset at 1080p resolution, without upscaling, and played through the courtyard battle in Chapter 6 three times, recording the entire battle with CapFrameX. We were careful to use the same weapons each time and go after the enemy spawns in the same order.
The RTX 4080 throws off the scale a bit, but the takeaway from this graph is that everything here is eminently playable at 1080p Medium. You might think, "Well, I sure hope so," but remember, this is a ray-tracing-mandatory game; you cannot turn off ray-tracing and it is always in use. With that in mind, the results here are nothing short of excellent, as every single card has solid frame-time consistency and an average over 40 FPS. Make no mistake: the game looks fantastic even at these settings, and "Medium" is a considerable upgrade from "Low." Check out the Radeon RX 6800 XT running right along with the GeForce RTX 3080 in this heavy RT title.
For our more capable GPUs, we tested the game in 3840×2160 resolution using "Quality" upscaling. This means DLSS 4 Transformer model on the GeForce cards, and XeSS on the other GPUs. It's important to remember that while XeSS looks very good—and even better on the Arc GPUs—it isn't quite producing the same image quality as DLSS 4, so the GeForce cards do have a bit of an image quality advantage here that isn't showing up in the raw numbers. Still, this game looks phenomenal at 4K, even AI upscaling from 1440p (which is what "Quality" equates to).
A few cards start to really struggle here, and frankly those cards don't really have the performance for 4K gaming. With that said, the reason we tested them and not some of the more powerful GPUs (like the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti) is because they have enough video RAM. Cards with 8GB of video RAM are really going to struggle in this game, especially at 1440p and higher resolution. You can reduce the texture pool setting to help somewhat, but lowering it below 2048MB really has some dire effects on texture quality, so we wouldn't advise it.
Obviously, the GeForce RTX 4080 is in a class of its own here, but the Radeon RX 7800 XT comports itself very well, as does the Arc B580. Putting out nearly 40 FPS at these settings is phenomenal for a sub-$300 GPU. The Radeon RX 6800 XT had consistently poor frame times in comparison to other GPUs, but the variance here (around 20%) is still far less than you will see in most other games, like the recent Oblivion remaster.
There's a few things to note here. Alchemist continues to be terrible on the power efficiency front, Ampere is only slightly better, and the Radeons make up the middle of the pack. However, there's something funky going on with Battlemage in this game. Just like with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, those GPUs don't seem to be able to reach their full potential; the power consumption of both the B570 and B580 is around 15% below their power limits. That does mean that they offer remarkable efficiency in this game, competitive with NVIDIA's power-sipping Ada Lovelace GPUs. We could see a driver update from Intel that significantly improves performance.
And no, it's not a CPU limitation, in fact, The Dark Ages is unbelievably light on CPUs. Other outlets, like Digital Foundry, have tested with lower-end CPUs and found that even a Ryzen 5 3600 is enough to satisfy the game's CPU requirements at 60 FPS. Our Core Ultra 9 285K handily outpaces the older Zen chip, but just to be sure, we also tested a few GPUs on a Ryzen 9 9900X machine and saw absolutely no change. You won't have to worry much about your CPU in this game as long as it's relatively recent.
This isn't a full review of the game so we'll hold off from giving our thoughts on the title in detail, but in brief, DOOM: The Dark Ages is a sharp departure for the series that we think is going to be highly divisive. The game is well-made and does some very interesting and unique things in the context of "DOOM," but not everyone is going to be happy with the radical shift in direction. If you're a DOOM stalwart, we might suggest waiting for the game to go on discount, but if you're a more general action game fan and you can separate the title from the gameplay, there's a lot to enjoy here.
And of course, if your PC isn't quite up to the task of pushing the pixels for Doom: The Dark Ages, we'd highly suggest checking out our latest Gaming PC Build Guide.
And of course, if your PC isn't quite up to the task of pushing the pixels for Doom: The Dark Ages, we'd highly suggest checking out our latest Gaming PC Build Guide.
You can pick up DOOM: The Dark Ages on Steam, for consoles at Amazon, or at the game store of your choice.
