Doom: The Dark Ages is a great-looking game, leveraging the ray tracing enhancements that the latest iteration of iDTech affords the blood-soaked shooter. But if you're on PC, then you can unlock the true potential of the engine with the awaited path tracing update, at the expense of a lot of performance.
For those unfamiliar, path tracing is an all-encompassing form of ray tracing, which simulates how rays of light bounce off surfaces, that is far more demanding. Objects shoot out more rays and allow those rays to bounce around a scene more than once, leading to far more accurate lighting, better ambient occlusion, and better reflections and surface material approximations. It is, when implemented correctly, a night-and-day difference to standard ray tracing techniques, albeit only afforded by some of the best hardware on the market.
Path tracing can be transformative in Doom: The Dark Ages, if you find the right scene to do some comparisons, and it's interior spaces seem to benefit the most. Light bounces and illuminates objects in ways that standard ray tracing can't afford, while the contrast between the areas where light is meant to be, and where it definitely shouldn't, are more naturally defined. Digital Foundry has released an extensive look at many of the improvements path tracing affords, which gives you a good idea if the additional visual flair is worth it.
That's because you'll need to give up a lot of performance to take advantage of path tracing, even if you restrict which game objects make use of it. You'll be making heavy use of Nvidia's DLSS or frame generation to keep the action feeling smooth, with Tom's Guide stating that performance plummeted by 40% on the RTX 5070Ti used for testing. Your mileage may vary depending on what GPU you're using, but just like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle before it, this isn't a setting you can just turn on and forget about.
Doom: The Dark Ages is another great entry in the modern reinvention of the series, continuing from the strong foundations established with 2016's Doom and Doom Eternal, while taking the action in a wholly new direction. In GameSpot's Doom: The Dark Ages review, we praised this new direction saying, "Doom: The Dark Ages shows that there's still so much fertile ground that this series can explore, and that sometimes smart, measured changes can take the series in surprising new directions and yield some of its finest moments."
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For those unfamiliar, path tracing is an all-encompassing form of ray tracing, which simulates how rays of light bounce off surfaces, that is far more demanding. Objects shoot out more rays and allow those rays to bounce around a scene more than once, leading to far more accurate lighting, better ambient occlusion, and better reflections and surface material approximations. It is, when implemented correctly, a night-and-day difference to standard ray tracing techniques, albeit only afforded by some of the best hardware on the market.
Path tracing can be transformative in Doom: The Dark Ages, if you find the right scene to do some comparisons, and it's interior spaces seem to benefit the most. Light bounces and illuminates objects in ways that standard ray tracing can't afford, while the contrast between the areas where light is meant to be, and where it definitely shouldn't, are more naturally defined. Digital Foundry has released an extensive look at many of the improvements path tracing affords, which gives you a good idea if the additional visual flair is worth it.
That's because you'll need to give up a lot of performance to take advantage of path tracing, even if you restrict which game objects make use of it. You'll be making heavy use of Nvidia's DLSS or frame generation to keep the action feeling smooth, with Tom's Guide stating that performance plummeted by 40% on the RTX 5070Ti used for testing. Your mileage may vary depending on what GPU you're using, but just like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle before it, this isn't a setting you can just turn on and forget about.
Doom: The Dark Ages is another great entry in the modern reinvention of the series, continuing from the strong foundations established with 2016's Doom and Doom Eternal, while taking the action in a wholly new direction. In GameSpot's Doom: The Dark Ages review, we praised this new direction saying, "Doom: The Dark Ages shows that there's still so much fertile ground that this series can explore, and that sometimes smart, measured changes can take the series in surprising new directions and yield some of its finest moments."
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