We're only a few days away from the public launch of Doom: The Dark Ages, id Software's newest entry in the 32-year-old franchise. Take a leaf from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which used the id Tech 7 engine, the new Doom uses ray tracing all the time for global lighting, reflections, and shadows. As I discovered in my performance analysis, it's not quite as demanding on your rig as you might expect, and even a handheld gaming PC can run the id Tech 8-powered shooter. Well, for a few seconds.
The above video has been captured on an Asus ROG Ally, set to its 30 W performance mode, with Doom: The Dark Ages configured to use the Low graphics preset, along with FSR Performance upscaling. As you can see, it manages to pull a consistent 30 fps...for nearly 40 seconds, before the drivers bailed out.
Admittedly, the game launched with a big warning about how the ROG Ally's GPU drivers were old and not recommended for use with Doom: The Dark Ages, so it's not like the above crash is unexpected.
However, the frustrating part of all of this isn't the crash or the blurry, heavily upscaled graphics. It's the fact that updating the GPU drivers for the ROG Ally is far harder than it needs to be. Unlike with AMD's desktop and laptop graphics processors, where I can download the latest Adrenalin software, I'm stuck waiting for Asus to release better drivers for the ROG Ally.
