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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Rick Lane

Doom: The Dark Ages gets Steam Deck verification and a bunch of portable optimisations, just in time for the launch of Microsoft's new handheld

Doom: The Dark Ages best weapons - Slayer.

Doom: The Dark Ages is officially Steam Deck verified, which is surprising only in how long it took considering id Software's history delivering shooters that are not just visually impressive, but exceedingly well optimised. The studio has worked minor miracles with handheld ports too, most notably the Nintendo Switch version of 2020's Doom Eternal.

That said, The Dark Ages was the first Doom game to be fully and constantly ray-traced, making it a less obvious candidate for handheld gaming when it launched. While it ran well enough on most PC hardware and could even deliver reasonable framerates on a cheap gaming laptop, as Andy Edser noted in his PC performance analysis, the Steam Deck nonetheless struggled to meet its minimum requirements, and as such performance was underwhelming.

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