DOOM The Dark Ages’ Path Tracing Update is launching on June 18th
DOOM: The Dark Ages’ Path Tracing mode will soon be available to PC gamers
Nvidia has confirmed that DOOM: The Dark Ages’ path tracing mode will become available on June 18th, more than a month after the game initially launched.
With path tracing, the ray-traced visuals of DOOM: The Dark Ages have been taken to the next level. With path tracing, bounce lighting is enhanced to create more realistic visuals. Furthermore, light sources have been enhanced to more realistically illuminate areas, with even small lighting elements gaining emissive properties. Reflections are also improved, delivering higher levels of in-game detail.
This path tracing implementation has Nvidia written all over it
Nvidia has confirmed that DOOM: The Dark Ages’ new path tracing mode will feature Nvidia’s Spatial Hash Radiance Cache (SHaRC) technology alongside Nvidia Shader Execution Reordering to compute and accelerate path tracing calculations. Furthermore, this mode is expected to be used in conjunction with DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution, and Frame Generation to play DOOM: The Dark Ages at high framerates.
Below, we can see how this mode runs at 4K with Nvidia’s RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards. Note that DLSS Multi Frame Generation is used alongside DLSS Super Resolution in performance mode.
(Image from Nvidia)
DOOM: The Dark Ages Path Tracing Performance
When looking at the data below, it must be noted that DLSS Super Resolution (Balanced Mode) is used alongside DLSS Multi Frame Generation. This means that three out of every four frames are AI-generated. While these frames look great, it should be noted that the game is running at lower speeds. This has an impact on latency, as an AI-generated 200+ FPS experience will not feel as responsive as a game natively rendered at 200+ FPS. That said, games with frame generation will look more fluid than games without frame generation. That said, this assumes that you play your games on a screen fast enough to display all of those frames.
For Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, Nvidia showcases an average framerate of 174.8 FPS, which is 43.7 FPS when AI-generated frames are discounted. While the displayed framerate is high, the DOOM series is at its best when played with minimal latency. In other words, it plays best when the game’s base framerate is high.
Don’t expect this mode to run well on AMD or Intel hardware
If this is how DOOM’s path tracing mode runs with Multi-Frame Generation maxed out, I wouldn’t expect it to run well without Frame Generation. Furthermore, its abundance of Nvidia technologies implies that this game mode will not run well on non-Nvidia GPU hardware. This game mode is designed with Nvidia hardware in mind. Even then, it relies on Frame Generation and AI upscaling technologies to run well on Nvidia hardware.
Even without this new mode, DOOM: The Dark Ages can be challenging enough to run as-is. You can read our PC performance review for the DOOM: The Dark Ages here. We will try out the game’s path tracing mode when it launches. I wonder how well it will run on Nvidia’s older GPUs…
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