Doom: The Dark Ages PC Performance Review (2025)

Editor’s note: Nvidia India provided a PC copy of Doom: The Dark Ages along with one unit each of its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition (12GB) and Inno3D GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB Twin X2 to IGN India for this performance review.

The iconic first-person shooter, Doom has returned with its latest title, Doom: The Dark Ages. Dark Ages tells the story of the Doom Slayer’s effort to save humankind in a war against Hell. The game serves as a prequel to Doom (2016), and its story is set many years before the events of the earlier Bethesda title.

While we will leave our thoughts on the game for the full Doom: The Dark Ages review, we will focus on how the game performs on PC here. Technically, the highlight of Dark Ages is its latest game engine, id Tech 8. id Tech is the in-house game engine developed by id Software. This newest engine adds cutting-edge graphics features like path tracing and destructible environments. It is also the first engine (along with The Dark Ages game) that needs hardware-accelerated ray tracing. You can't play the game if your hardware can not do this.

Doom: The Dark Ages PC Requirements

While previous Doom games were known for running well even on modest hardware, considering hardware-accelerated ray tracing, you will require relatively stronger specifications.

History of id Tech Game Engine

Looking at the history of the engine, the developer first used id Tech 1 in the first Doom game, which was released in 1993. This engine was initially known as the "Doom engine", and id Software co-founder John Carmack created it for NeXT computers. The engine was later ported to MS-DOS, along with other OSes and game consoles. While we know the Wolfenstein 3D engine from 1992 as id Tech 0, technically, it wasn't the first 3D engine that id Software created.

The developer released id Tech 2, initially called the "Quake engine", in 1996 for the first Quake game. Version 3 launched in 1999 for Quake 3 Arena game, and version 4 came out in 2004 for Doom 3. As with id Tech 3, id Tech 4 was also known as "Doom 3 engine". Till the release of id Tech 5, the earlier engines did not have any official designation, and the retroactive rebranding happened later.

All the engines till id Tech 4.5 (yes, id Tech game engine lineup decimal versions as some engines were updated down the line to add some new features) are currently available as free software as part of the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) GPL (General Public License) to the public. All these engines were meant for other game developers to use the technological advancements in their games. In fact, id Software had plans to compete with Unreal Engine and regain market share with the release of id Tech 5 in 2011.

However, things changed after ZeniMax Media acquired id Software in 2009. After the acquisition, ZeniMax (and currently Microsoft) kept all the engines from id Tech 5 to the latest — id Tech 8, proprietary.

Feature-wise, the company has consistently released new engine versions to add the latest advancements over the last three decades. Some of the highlights include colored lighting in id Tech 2, having a software renderer till id Tech 2.5, large outdoor environments and single-player scripting in id Tech 3 (it was also the basis of the IW game engine that is used in the Call of Duty franchise), and switching to C++ in id Tech 4.

id Tech 5 introduced a new graphics renderer along with MegaTexture 2.0 tech, and more, id Tech 6 added Vulkan rendering support and id Tech 7 introduced increased geometric details without impacting frame rates. Besides the improvements mentioned above, id Tech 8 also increases the maximum number of enemies on-screen at any given time.

With all these improvements, id Tech engine is known for its excellent optimisation and scalability to ensure the game runs on a wide range of devices. So, when id Software first announced id Tech 8, I had high hopes.

Doom: The Dark Ages PC Benchmark Setup

For benchmarking the game, I used my personal AM4-based system and swapped the GPU one after the other. Here are all the specifications for the test bench.

While Zen 2-based Ryzen 9 3950X is over 5 years old, it has enough headroom to run the latest games and GPUs reasonably. In fact, this test scenario is quite realistic for gamers who plan to upgrade their GPUs to run newer games if they have a decent CPU, especially in the Indian market. Finally, regarding technical compatibility, Zen 2 qualifies as the minimum specifications one would need to run the game.

I used the 1080p resolution to evaluate the performance of Doom: The Dark Ages in the "Ultra Nightmare" graphics preset. In addition to the preset, I switched V-Sync off, changed Motion Blur to only show during the cinematics, and enabled Nvidia Reflex Mode.

As with previous game performance reviews, I used the CapFrameX tool to test all the graphics technologies Doom: The Dark Ages supports at launch. These include upscaling technologies like Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling (TAA), Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) across different presets, and Frame Generation (2x for DLSS and just on for FSR). As mentioned above, the game does not run without ray tracing, so I didn't need to test it separately. Here are all the benchmark results for the game using upscaling technologies.

Doom: The Dark Ages: TAA Performance and Analysis

TAA or Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling performance of The Dark Ages is an excellent showcase of the flexibility of the id Tech 8 game engine. We get 89.8 fps in Ultra Nightmare graphics preset at 1080p resolution on GeForce RTX 4070. While the 8GB variant of the RTX 5060 Ti does perform decently with 51.6 fps, it is still more to do with the engine that seems to scale with the VRAM available for the game. It is evident by the fact that I did not change any other settings, like the texture pool size. However, the game highlights that we are at the edge (or even exceeding) of the currently available video memory in the video settings section of the game.

While I didn't use a newer, AMD CPU with 3D V-Cache, the GPU-Busy and frame time averages of 11.1 ms and 11.1 ms, respectively, on RTX 4070 outline that the game was GPU-bound. In technical terms, GPU-bound means that the game's performance was limited due to the GPU instead of the CPU. The situation remained similar for the RTX 5060 Ti as the average frame time was 19.4 ms while the average GPU-Busy time was 19.1 ms.

Nvidia DLSS 4 and Frame Generation and Analysis

After extensive testing across four different DLSS quality modes, we get to see the length and breadth of how id Tech 8 handles a mix of old (minimum spec in terms of the CPU), moderate (RTX 4070), and new (RTX 5060 Ti) hardware. The DLSS models include DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing), Quality, Balanced, and Ultra Performance.

Overall, we did not see any surprises, and the game ran without any issues in all scenarios without any crashes. We did see a bug while switching to the desktop (Alt+Tab key combination) to double-check our benchmark logging, where switching back to the game froze the game's visuals. The only resolution to this issue was closing the game and restarting it, and id Software will most likely push a fix for this issue.

But there were some things, somewhat obvious things to note. These included the limits of the 8GB 5060 Ti GPU, where frame-generation pushed the Average 1% and 0.1% lows below 30 fps in all DLSS presets except for Ultra Performance. Comparing it with a 12GB VRAM-equipped RTX 4070, the average 1% fps was about 56.9, and the 0.1% fps was above 41.5 fps in all cases. The regular DLAA preset of DLSS without frame generation also pushed the average fps of the game to 28.5, outlining that it just isn't enough. In contrast, the 12GB VRAM GPU maintained the average fps at 85.2.

Besides this, we also noticed the CPU-bound nature of the game in the Balanced and Ultra Performance quality presets without frame generation. This became apparent in the Balanced mode when the frame time average and GPU-Busy average showed a gap of 0.6 ms, which increased to 1.6 ms in the Ultra Performance preset. This is likely due to the lower clock speeds on the Zen 2-based Ryzen 9 3950X.

Finally, the last thing we noticed, which isn't surprising with DLSS, is that the frame time was all over the place. The DLSS Ultra Performance mode with Frame Generation on RTX 4070 resulted in a 167.33-second stuttering, which accounted for about 94.5 percent of the total run, each time. In contrast, the frame time only stuttered for 0.23 seconds or about 0.1 percent of the test time in the FSR Ultra Performance mode with Frame Generation on RTX 4070.

AMD FSR and Frame Generation and Analysis

Besides fixing the frame time stuttering, FSR essentially offered similar numbers. This means similar limitations in the 8GB VRAM and CPU-bound nature of the Zen 2-based processor. As you can see, while FSR offered lower average fps without frame generation on both GPUs, it gave higher average 1% and 0.1% lows. After turning frame generation on, FSR and DLSS traded blows with each other on RTX 4070. But, things were quite clear on the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, where FSR offered higher numbers.

However, the higher numbers from FSR came at the expense of bad, crayon-colored visual distortion on FSR, as FSR 3 is competing with DLSS 4. At the lower fps level (demanding situations), I am sure one would prefer the average frames to be 39.8 (FSR 3 in Native AA mode with 2x Frame Generation) instead of 18 (DLSS 4 in DLAA mode with 2x Frame Generation). But, it is up to you if you want a playable experience with blotchy, grain-filled graphics or a stuttery one with slightly better visuals.

The Verdict

This performance analysis highlights the strong points of the id Tech 8 game engine and DLSS. At the same time, it also outlines how VRAM is critical and that 8GB GPUs should not exist in 2025. Instead, as my testing with the RTX 4070 showed, I would rather have buyers get a generation or two older GPUs with more VRAM. This review did not highlight a particular need for the latest CPU to get a good, playable experience in the latest games. But, it did reveal that you should get one if you have displays with a refresh rate above 120Hz (or 240Hz in case of frame generation). Testing and comparing two generations of Nvidia GPUs (40 series and 50 series) showcased the technical superiority of Doom: The Dark Ages more than the generational improvements in the hardware. If you have reasonably modern hardware with enough VRAM, Doom: The Dark Ages will run flawlessly.