Doom has been around so long—32 years and counting—that you'd be forgiven for thinking that developers id Software must have produced hundreds of entries for the franchise on PC. The shocking truth is there have just been five, if one ignores all the third-party versions, expansion stuff and rejigged editions. And it's been five years since the last one, Doom Eternal, graced our gaming rigs. Well, it's back again and Doom: The Dark Ages is the first Doom game to be fully ray traced, all the time.
If that's got you worried about performance or the necessity for blurry upscalers and wonky frame generation, then let me allay those fears now—Doom: The Dark Ages runs pretty well across a decent range of PC configurations, though the entry requirements are a little on the steep side.
First of all, you need a GPU with dedicated ray tracing hardware. For AMD users, that means an RX 6000-series graphics card or newer. In the case of Intel, both generations of the Arc range will do, and for Nvidia fans, any RTX card will cut the mustard. Well, not quite any card because Doom: The Dark Ages also requires 8 GB of VRAM as a minimum.
Actually, it doesn't and I'll prove this shortly. What you do need, though, is a decent platform around your graphics card. While Doom: The Dark Ages isn't super heavy on your CPU, it does need to be reasonably new and, ideally, one with 12 threads or more. But enough chitter-chatter, let's go and see how well the new Doom actually runs.
