Doom: The Dark Ages has finally been released for PCs, and is built on top of the impressive id Tech 8 game engine. The game uses modern rendering and upscaling techniques, along with mandatory ray tracing.
This means that Doom: The Dark Ages is a lot more demanding than prior Doom games, and mandates a minimum of 8 GB VRAM. The game is challenging to run, and will require some extensive tweaking to boost frame rates.
You can find a general list of the best, optimized PC settings for Doom: The Dark Ages below, assuming you exceed the minimum PC system requirements.
Optimized Doom: The Dark Ages PC settings
- Window Mode: Fullscreen
- Aspect Ratio: 21:9; adjust to your display’s native aspect ratio (yes, ultrawide is supported!)
- Resolution: 3440×1440; swap to your display’s native resolution
- Refresh Rate: Uncapped; might be worth lowering to 60 for handheld devices
- Vertical Sync: Off; always keep disabled
- Present Form Compute: Off
- Field of View: 100; user preference
- Sharpening: 1.50; user preference
- Film Grain: 0.00; user preference
- Upscaler: FSR/DLSS/XeSS; DLSS is only available for Nvidia RTX GPUs
- DLSS/FSR Super Resolution: Balanced; drop to Performance on lower-end systems
- FSR Sharpness: 40%; user preference
- FSR Frame Generation: Off; frame generation introduces additional latency and ghosting
- Nvidia Reflex Mode: Off
- Motion Blur: Off; personal preference
- Overall Quality Slider: High (this affects all presets under the Advanced tab)
The game was tested on an AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT at 3440×1440 (21:9, ultrawide) with the preset above. Overall, the game can maintain an often wonky 60 frames per second.
Otherwise, the game doesn’t seem to exhibit too many crashes, at least on AMD.
The game’s implementation of always-forced RT makes things a lot more difficult, and kind of breaks DOOM’s stereotype of being able to run on some of the weakest hardware possibly known to man.
