Doom: The Dark Ages: How 13 GPUs Fared in the Medieval Battle

Doom: The Dark Ages is the newest addition to the Doom series. It blends medieval fantasy with modern combat. The game is powered by the latest id Tech engine, Id Tech 8. This version of Doom trades the familiar Martian landscapes for a dark fantasy setting. The brutal combat, iconic metal soundtrack, and smooth performance remain. The game was tested on 13 different GPUs. These ranged from mid-range to high-end graphics cards. The goal was to see how well the game performs across different hardware. The test platform used was a Core Ultra 9 285K. It had 48GB of DDR5 memory running at 8666MT/s. The system also had a fresh install of Windows 11 Pro 24H2. The latest graphics drivers for each GPU vendor were used. The testing focused on the Medium and High presets. The Ultra and Nightmare settings were not tested. These settings are not fully implemented yet. The game's performance was evaluated in a large outdoor battle in Chapter 6. This area had notably worse performance than the rest of the game. The game's performance characteristics are interesting. High frame rates require a lot of GPU power. However, the game is playable even on lower-end hardware. The visuals scale well with the hardware. The game looks stunning on a GeForce RTX 4080. It also looks good on lower-end cards. The game was tested at 1080p on "Low" settings. The visuals were found to be perfectly acceptable, even on a 4K monitor.

The game runs smoothly, even at lower frame rates. The frametime graph shows a flat line, indicating smooth performance. The game remains playable at around 30 FPS. This is due in part to the game's slower pace compared to previous Doom games. The lower-end GPUs were tested at 1080p Medium preset. The game was recorded with CapFrameX. The same weapons and enemy spawns were used each time. The higher-end GPUs were tested at 3840×2160 resolution. The "Quality" upscaling was used. This means DLSS 4 Transformer model on GeForce cards and XeSS on others. The game looks phenomenal at 4K, even with AI upscaling from 1440p. Some cards struggled at this resolution. Cards with 8GB of video RAM had trouble. The texture pool setting can be reduced, but this affects texture quality. The GeForce RTX 4080 performed exceptionally well. The Radeon RX 7800 XT and Arc B580 also performed well. The Radeon RX 6800 XT had poor frame times. The power efficiency of the GPUs varied. The Radeons were in the middle of the pack. The Intel GPUs had lower power consumption. The game is not demanding on the CPU. Even a Ryzen 5 3600 is enough to meet the game's requirements. The Core Ultra 9 285K outperformed the older Zen chip. Testing on a Ryzen 9 9900X showed no change in performance. The game is not CPU-intensive.

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