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DOOM: The Dark Ages

I want to know what the future holds for the Doom series...a long hiatus similar to Doom 3---> Doom 2016?
 
imsirovic5 said:
Chapter 16, really don't want it to end so savoring every moment and collecting everything. Playing on nightmare ensures I die enough times to extend my playthrough considerably 🤣
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I didn’t play nightmare. Already on ultra violence I die enough times. Mostly because of the ads. They piss me off.
 
The game looks bad ass. I am looking forward to playing it but not enough for it to skip my current backlog. I probably have another 30 hours of Ghosts of Tsushima and then will be moving on to Spiderman.
 
I'm glad I pushed past my initial hatred during the first two missions, it's fairly fun and the dreadful parry mechanic isn't all that bad. The timing on it is very generous. Just pretend it's not a Doom game and it's enjoyable.

There's no shortage of issues though. The music sucks, for obvious reasons, and it really detracts from the experience compared to 2016 and Eternal. HDR is somehow completely busted, despite Eternal having had great HDR. Changing key bindings is wonky, and you can't bind individual weapons to separate keys for god knows what reason. And that's not even touching on the fact that the gameplay blows massive chunks in comparison to Eternal. Why they went from FPS perfection back to clunky slow gameplay with Soulslike parry garbage piled on top is beyond me.

I'm also very happy about the forced RT. We've had RT hardware for over 6 years now. We're long overdue for developers to begin building games from the ground up to utilize it.
 
I don’t agree about gameplay sucking. It has a different rhythm is what I would describe it as.

Doom had a different rhythm
Eternal completely changed it
And this is also changed

I will have to go back through all 3 to pick a favorite but I know that I felt like a badass in all games, I felt the difficulty was also very good in all games, the setting and environments are also great in all games and music is really (for me - not a music buff) very similar.

So this is right up there. I need to continue progressing through it. Had to finish Andor yesterday so didn’t play this. But today will be chewing through some demons and busting their balls.
 
CaptainClueless said:
I'm also very happy about the forced RT. We've had RT hardware for over 6 years now. We're long overdue for developers to begin building games from the ground up to utilize it.
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I don't mind it, but most gamers don't have good RT capable hardware. 9070XT or RTX 5070 is about the minimum GPU that handles RT somewhat well. Then there are consoles. Even with the upcoming consoles, they will still be on AMD. Unless AMD has a massive leap in RT performance (doubtful), expect the issue to continue for many more years to come. Next consoles will probably have a 9070XT performing GPU, maybe with slightly better RT performance. Remember, Nvidia's RT performance has stagnated with the 5*** cards as well. No real efficiency gains in RT, just around 15% performance uplift in both raster and RT with the exception of the $2500+ RTX 5090.
 
Flogger23m said:
I don't mind it, but most gamers don't have good RT capable hardware. 9070XT or RTX 5070 is about the minimum GPU that handles RT somewhat well. Then there are consoles. Even with the upcoming consoles, they will still be on AMD. Unless AMD has a massive leap in RT performance (doubtful), expect the issue to continue for many more years to come. Next consoles will probably have a 9070XT performing GPU, maybe with slightly better RT performance. Remember, Nvidia's RT performance has stagnated with the 5*** cards as well. No real efficiency gains in RT, just around 15% performance uplift in both raster and RT with the exception of the $2500+ RTX 5090.
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It isn't really true that the 9070XT and 5070 cards are minimum. AMD's 7000 series is capable in RT, but they starts to struggle when there are lots of RT so they can run games with RT, but don't have the power to run PT or very heavy RT. Id tech is built so that it runs well on both Nvidia and AMD. E.g. my 7900 GRE would keep up with my 3080 and both would be around 60fps at 1440p without upscaling, according to techpowerup's benchmarks. My 5070 ti is quite ahead of my older cards, but it's not like older hardware is bad in id tech 8.

It will probably look quite different once we get path tracing though. It might be possible that my 5070 ti can run PT with upscaling, but we won't know for sure until PT is released. E.g. my 5070 ti can run Cyberpunk 2077 with PT at 1440p with average around 60fps in phantom liberty areas and closer to 70 fps in base game areas by using DLSS Quality and ray reconstruction. Running DLSS quality without ray reconstruction it looks worse and runs at just below 60 and native it is hovering around 30 fps in phantom liberty and mid to high 30s in base game areas. There is no way to get decent framerates on a 3080 with PT in Cyberpunk.
 
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evhvis said:
It isn't really true that the 9070XT and 5070 cards are minimum. AMD's 7000 series is capable in RT, but they starts to struggle when there are lots of RT so they can run games with RT, but don't have the power to run PT or very heavy RT. Id tech is built so that it runs well on both Nvidia and AMD. E.g. my 7900 GRE would keep up with my 3080 and both would be around 60fps at 1440p without upscaling, according to techpowerup's benchmarks. My 5070 ti is quite ahead of my older cards, but it's not like older hardware is bad in id tech 8.

It will probably look quite different once we get path tracing though. It might be possible that my 5070 ti can run PT with upscaling, but we won't know for sure until PT is released. E.g. my 5070 ti can run Cyberpunk 2077 with PT at 1440p with average around 60fps in phantom liberty areas and closer to 70 fps in base game areas by using DLSS Quality and ray reconstruction. Running DLSS quality without ray reconstruction it looks worse and runs at just below 60 and native it is hovering around 30 fps in phantom liberty and mid to high 30s in base game areas. There is no way to get decent framerates on a 3080 with PT in Cyberpunk.
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That is kind of my point though. The price point for this type of performance is still $600+. 5070tis are going for $820+ now. The next generation of Nvidia and especially AMD needs to see a massive jump in ray tracing performance. I'm talking about 30%+, in addition to 30%+ in raster (~ 30% faster in raster games, ~60% faster in ray tracing games). Right now turning on ray tracing still about halves frame rates. We're in the 4th generation of Nvidia ray tracing cards, and the current GPUs still struggle with it. I assume whatever is out in the next 1-2 years will be the basis of the next console generation. If ray tracing performance isn't drastically better by then, I assume PS6/Xbox Whatever games will still need raster lighting.
 
Flogger23m said:
That is kind of my point though. The price point for this type of performance is still $600+. 5070tis are going for $820+ now. The next generation of Nvidia and especially AMD needs to see a massive jump in ray tracing performance. I'm talking about 30%+, in addition to 30%+ in raster (~ 30% faster in raster games, ~60% faster in ray tracing games). Right now turning on ray tracing still about halves frame rates. We're in the 4th generation of Nvidia ray tracing cards, and the current GPUs still struggle with it. I assume whatever is out in the next 1-2 years will be the basis of the next console generation. If ray tracing performance isn't drastically better by then, I assume PS6/Xbox Whatever games will still need raster lighting.
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You don't need to use a 5070 ti or higher to play RT games, it just gives a bit more performance. Both the cards I mentioned (3080 and 7900GRE) are more than enough for 1440p in doom the dark ages and the 3080 came out almost 5 years ago. Doom seems to be optimized for both AMD and Nvidia so it runs fine on AMD hardware, even if AMD has generally been around 1 generation behind in RT performance. There are lots of older cards that can run doom the dark ages just fine, people just need to turn down some of the settings or use upscaling if their GPU is lower mid range. Something like a 3060 ti can run the game fine with some tweaking at 1440p with upscaling or 1080p with no upscaling.

The major jump in RT performance was from the 20 to 30 series for Nvidia with smaller gains after that. AMD has had a decent jump in both the 7000 and 9000 series, but they are still lagging a bit behind.

RT is very computationally expensive so expect AI to be the norm as brute force will require large chips which drives up the price. E.g. DLSS 4 ray reconstruciton works wonders for performance with PT and it also generally increases image quality over running native RT denoising. DLSS 4 TF is now at a point where quality setting is very close to native and sometimes surpass native if the TAA implementation is poor. AMD is a bit behind on their software stack, but FSR 4 seems to be a massive step in the right direction and they have something similar to ray reconstruction in the works.

Using raster lighting will most likely be a choice on the next gen consoles. My guess is that we will get around 9070xt performance. The PS5 pro is more like a 7700 xt, but is still capable of running RT features in assassins creed shadows etc. There is a massive difference between optimizing for a broad range of configurations vs custom building for a fixed feature set.

Full path tracing is different as it is still a high end feature and not something you can expect to be able to use on entry level or lower mid range GPUs any time soon. Essentially we are back to high-end GPUs being needed for highest level graphics after many years of requirements slowly going down.
 
Did a little revisit to some of the first levels and the game just starts off really slow IMO. Basically the Siege levels (level 6 and 7) are where it really starts to come into it's own. The first levels are mostly about introduction so you are missing the really interesting enemies.

I found Dark Ages to be very enjoyable once past the first few levels which er decent enough and it kept it up all the way. There is more variation in the Dark Ages than in the previous games and the Dragon levels and Atlan levels do provide som variation even if the "vehicles" aren't amazing. The parry system does offer something fresh and is really fun to use once you get into it and I wouldn't have nearly as much fun without it.

I would rate this my favorite out of the 3 modern doom games. For me the weakest one is easily Doom 2016 as the combat doesn't feel as good until quite a bit into the second half of game. Eternal has higher highs than the Dark Ages but it also has lower lows. There were some parts of Eternal that I absolutely hated and some that were amazing. The best combat arenas in Eternal are still the best combat in Doom, but most encounters in Eternal are less fun for me than the ones in the Dark Ages.
 
Flogger23m said:
The price point for this type of performance is still $600+.
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It really depends what we mean here, a 5060 has 58 RT tflops, that not that far from an RTX 3090 (69.5 tflops), next gen the 6060 will have comfortably pass the 3090, 6070 will about double it, probably.

You can get a lot of raw RTX performance versus a few years ago at good price:
5070_V-Ray_RTX.png


A 5060 will not be far from the 3080 would it be in that graph, a 5060ti would be at that level. a 5070 near 100 rttflops is having more than anything that existed in 2021/summer of 2022 by a decent amount and about a 40% gain over a 4070.

When it fit in memory a 5060 can more than double a 3060 in path traced games like black myth, the pace of gain seem still faster than the regular core FP32 evolution, but it seems hard to translate in game performance, for some reason the extra RT tflops, in most title, do not show up at all it seems (like in the real world the 5070 and the 4070 super are not really a part like that outside extreme game engine test case like in gameTechBench pathtracing were the 5070 can beat the 4070ti super and the 5080 the 4090...)
 
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evhvis said:
You don't need to use a 5070 ti or higher to play RT games, it just gives a bit more performance.
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Well yes, cheaper cards can run ray tracing. Technically you can play a game at 15 frame rates but that isn't playable, IMO.

Though not that bad, the RTX 5060ti 16GB is a good example:


rt-alan-wake-2-2560-1440.png
rt-cyberpunk-2077-2560-1440.png
rt-hogwarts-legacy-2560-1440.png
rt-spider-man-2-2560-1440.png


That is a $470-500 card, which is still out of the price range of most gamers. You can turn on DLSS which will bring some of those games to a playable 60 frame rates, but that is still a near $500 card that just barely squeezes by at 1440. Now most games are still on 1080 and this card, with ray tracing and DLSS, can get decent frame rates.

evhvis said:
Both the cards I mentioned (3080 and 7900GRE) are more than enough for 1440p in doom the dark ages and the 3080 came out almost 5 years ago.
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You can't buy those cards anymore, though modern equivalents will still be $480+.

evhvis said:
RT is very computationally expensive so expect AI to be the norm as brute force will require large chips which drives up the price. E.g. DLSS 4 ray reconstruciton works wonders for performance with PT and it also generally increases image quality over running native RT denoising. DLSS 4 TF is now at a point where quality setting is very close to native and sometimes surpass native if the TAA implementation is poor. AMD is a bit behind on their software stack, but FSR 4 seems to be a massive step in the right direction and they have something similar to ray reconstruction in the works.
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Yes, but even with DLSS, the performance leaves a lot to be desired in ray tracing. TAA often looks like shit, but even with DLSS GPUs struggle with ray tracing. Most gamers can't afford to drop $800+ on a 5070ti or $750+ on a 9070XT. Even the 5060ti 16GB is close to $500 as mentioned.

evhvis said:
Using raster lighting will most likely be a choice on the next gen consoles. My guess is that we will get around 9070xt performance.
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I'm really hoping it is a good bit faster in ray tracing than a 9070XT. Hard to tell what AMD will have available in the next 18 or so months. I assume whatever AMD has available around that time frame will be what ends up in the next consoles (I'm assuming those will be out 2028). We know graphics in other areas are getting more demanding as well. Unless there is a major ray tracing efficiency increase, console games will largely have raster... which means developers will still need to split time making raster and ray tracing. To really shine, developers will need to focus purely on ray tracing. The time savings are irrelevant if they still have to optimize for raster. I still think this will be a long ways off given the price of GPUs and the lack of ray tracing performance uplift.
 
Chapter 16 now. I hate when I keep ending up with 97-99% on levels. Almost taking me an hour per level trying to do everything. It is tons of fun and the levels are really very good with them introducing something new each time. Very cool game tbh.
 
KickAssCop said:
Chapter 16 now. I hate when I keep ending up with 97-99% on levels. Almost taking me an hour per level trying to do everything. It is tons of fun and the levels are really very good with them introducing something new each time. Very cool game tbh.
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On my second play through now and trying to 100% complete each level, but some are harder to find the objects than others for sure.
 
Flogger23m said:
Well yes, cheaper cards can run ray tracing. Technically you can play a game at 15 frame rates but that isn't playable, IMO.

Though not that bad, the RTX 5060ti 16GB is a good example:


View attachment 733155View attachment 733156View attachment 733157View attachment 733158

That is a $470-500 card, which is still out of the price range of most gamers. You can turn on DLSS which will bring some of those games to a playable 60 frame rates, but that is still a near $500 card that just barely squeezes by at 1440. Now most games are still on 1080 and this card, with ray tracing and DLSS, can get decent frame rates.



You can't buy those cards anymore, though modern equivalents will still be $480+.



Yes, but even with DLSS, the performance leaves a lot to be desired in ray tracing. TAA often looks like shit, but even with DLSS GPUs struggle with ray tracing. Most gamers can't afford to drop $800+ on a 5070ti or $750+ on a 9070XT. Even the 5060ti 16GB is close to $500 as mentioned.



I'm really hoping it is a good bit faster in ray tracing than a 9070XT. Hard to tell what AMD will have available in the next 18 or so months. I assume whatever AMD has available around that time frame will be what ends up in the next consoles (I'm assuming those will be out 2028). We know graphics in other areas are getting more demanding as well. Unless there is a major ray tracing efficiency increase, console games will largely have raster... which means developers will still need to split time making raster and ray tracing. To really shine, developers will need to focus purely on ray tracing. The time savings are irrelevant if they still have to optimize for raster. I still think this will be a long ways off given the price of GPUs and the lack of ray tracing performance uplift.
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You are aware that there is no law that makes it illegal to tune the settings? E.g. in Cyperpunk you can get around 15% extra performance with almost no visual impact and by turning stuff down quite a bit you can around 60fps average with RT on medium with a 3080 in that game, just not with max RT settings. DLSS 4 TF model is at a point where there is little drop off image quality at quality setting at 1440p and even balanced is OK with the TF model.

There haven't been many titles with RT only and both Doom the Dark Ages and Metro exodus enhanced run a lot better than the games that aren't built as RT only games.

If people buy lower mid range cards then they should expect 1080p with medium to high settings, high with lower fps or heavy upscaling and staying within the VRAM limits. Complaining that a lower mid range card is running a game at 30-40 fps at max settings with RT at 1440p is moving the goal posts a lot. People have just gotten spoiled as this is what the mid range segment used to look like at quite common resolutions (6950 is to the top AMD card of that gen what the 5070 ti is to the 5080):
1748880915017.png
 
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KickAssCop said:
Chapter 16 now. I hate when I keep ending up with 97-99% on levels. Almost taking me an hour per level trying to do everything. It is tons of fun and the levels are really very good with them introducing something new each time. Very cool game tbh.
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I failed to shoot down a chase ship in time and it ran away while I was stuck fighting a capitol ship. Didn't find it afterwards and ended the level on 99% after having spent maybe 20 minutes getting everything else in the level. Just so annoying. Love the game though and easily my favorite shooter in the last few years.
 
evhvis said:
You are aware that there is no law that makes it illegal to tune the settings? E.g. in Cyperpunk you can get around 15% extra performance with almost no visual impact and by turning stuff down quite a bit you can around 60fps average with RT on medium with a 3080 in that game, just not with max RT settings. DLSS 4 TF model is at a point where there is little drop off image quality at quality setting at 1440p and even balanced is OK with the TF model.
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You can turn down settings, like disable ray tracing. :p

Ray tracing has the biggest performance impact by far. You can turn down settings but in most games but it won't be enough to make a difference if ray tracing is still enabled. If you're getting 45 frame rates and turn down non-ray tracing settings, you'll get what, 51 frame rates (15% performance increase)? If you can't disable ray tracing, you're screwed. You're going from unacceptable frame rates too... unacceptable frame rates.

You can turn down graphics further and put everything on low, but the result will be worse graphics for the performance.

evhvis said:
There haven't been many titles with RT only and both Doom the Dark Ages and Metro exodus enhanced run a lot better than the games that aren't built as RT only games.
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Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages are exceptions. They all ran better than most games. ID really built the engines around Doom and know how to optimize. The previous games ran amazingly well and had no ray tracing; it isn't a ray tracing thing, it is an optimized game and competent developer thing.

evhvis said:
If people buy lower mid range cards then they should expect 1080p with medium to high settings, high with lower fps or heavy upscaling and staying within the VRAM limits.
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I think this is where we disagree. I don't consider $480-500 to be lower end. That is out of the price range of most gamers. If it costs $480-500 to get results I posted above, well, we're not ready for ray tracing. The majority of gamers won't be able to afford that. We need some massive gains in ray tracing efficiency before we can fully switch to it. Few developers are going to make a game that requires hardware that half of PC gamers can't run.

The RTX 5060 8GB at $300 (more like $350+, but I can find a few models at $300 so we'll go with that) is what a good portion of gamers will end up buying. Its performance in ray tracing, at 1080, leaves some to be desired:

rt-indiana-jones-1920-1080-ray-tracing-enabled.png
rt-spider-man-2-1920-1080.png
rt-cyberpunk-2077-1920-1080.png


Now at $300 you might expect to turn down some graphic settings, but you're going to need to turn them down quite a bit to get good performance with ray tracing. Even with DLSS you're going to struggle to hit 60 frame rates in some games. You can turn down the settings but again, you'll have to turn down practically everything to medium to get acceptable performance. The end result will be a worse visual quality experience compared to just turning off ray tracing. IMO, if the overall visuals need to decrease to enable ray tracing (draw distance, textures, less debris on screen, less characters on screen etc.) with playable performance that means we're not ready for ray tracing to become standard.

evhvis said:
Complaining that a lower mid range card is running a game at 30-40 fps at max settings with RT at 1440p is moving the goal posts a lot. People have just gotten spoiled as this is what the mid range segment used to look like at quite common resolutions (6950 is to the top AMD card of that gen what the 5070 ti is to the 5080):
View attachment 733211
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You used one of the worst optimized games in history, that still can't get solid frame rates on modern hardware. :ROFLMAO:
 
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On to chapter 17. Made a fuck up on 16 where I used my 3 bolts of BFC that didn't kill 20. Leading to another 99%. Should've seen my angry face!

Having said that this game slaps hard. I am loving it sooo much!
 
Flogger23m said:
Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages are exceptions. They all ran better than most games. ID really built the engines around Doom and know how to optimize. The previous games ran amazingly well and had no ray tracing; it isn't a ray tracing thing, it is an optimized game and competent developer thing.
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The lack of optimization is something that really irritates me about most games. The big irritation for me is the total lack of concern for proper thread management. I'm on the infrastructure side of the financial trading business, and we do a whole lot with optimizing what thread runs on what core. At work it's more like running on a console - we have our tested and approved server platform and thread assignments are manual. It is just not that hard to split your threads into 2 groups. One group that runs on Intel P-cores or the first or X3D CCD on an AMD proc, and a second group that gets shoveled off to e-cores or the second CCD. Unlike most games Doom the Dark Ages knows about different types of cores. That makes e-cores an asset rather than something that gets in the way. You don't want them running any of the hot threads, but they'd work great for lower priority jobs like background asset loading. DtDA maybe not have any practical use for a second CCD or e-cores on a decently powerful desktop processor, but the game knowing the difference between a P-core and an e-core or a full size and compact Zen core could help a lot on laptops with weaker CPUs.

I'm also not at all convinced that RT has to be as heavy as it is. Usually it's a bolt-on. You get check boxes for lighting, shadows, and reflections. There's no low-med-high-ultra like there is for raster graphics. At least most of the time. Metro Exodus Enhanced edition has normal, high and ultra for RT IIRC, and uses hybrid reflections at lower settings. I have an ARC B580 that runs it well on the "ultra" preset at 1080p and "high" at 1440p, meaning 1% lows at 60+ fps. No XeSS support, and 4k doesn't really work. I get like 50fps on the low preset, but it's an ARC B580. It also ran well on the 3060Ti I used to have. That card got a new owner a while back. I haven't picked up Doom the Dark Ages yet (I tend to wait a bit on new games for patches, and this one isn't even finished - I want the path tracing), but its closest cousin is probably Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. That also runs well on the B580, and looks quite nice. Not as nice as on my 5090 with path tracing cranked all the way up, but for a "$250" card I'm quite happy with it. IJatGC has multiple levels for the mandatory RT global illumination. Hopefully path tracing in Doom the Dark Ages won't be as heavy as it is in Indy. I'd like more than 60-80fps without using framegen or cranking DLSS all the way up to performance.
 
Chapter 19 now. Just when I thought they have shown all the badassery they could, chapter 19 walked in. Now I wonder if the whole game could’ve been played similar to this chapter.

Soooooooooo good!
 
Game auto-updated and now I can't play more than a few minutes before it crashes with BugSplat error. Had been working perfect but the update apparently broke it. Anyone else having this issue?
 
Finally back home and playing this after a month of waiting. I like it so far. It feels like I'm being bombarded with mechanics (and I'm no longer good at shooters), but it's fun.
Something tells me I'll end up having to turn the difficulty down at some point. I'm on ultra-violence and I don't think I'm good enough to keep this up for long.
 
HDR is still wonky on this still, trying a AW3225QF right now and HDR looks like crap compared to TLOU no matter how much you tweak...
 
polonyc2 said:
Path Tracing update coming June 18th

DOOM: The Dark Ages | 4K RTX Path Tracing Trailer with DLSS Ray Reconstruction


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waizZ-UZr7U
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Playing this game with MFG has to feel like dog water. If PT frames aren't atleast 60 with DLSS 4 alone it's not worth turning on IMO. The comparisons in graphics quality for the fire effects in particular seem stark, but not enough to remove smoothness.
 
Decko said:
Playing this game with MFG has to feel like dog water. If PT frames aren't atleast 60 with DLSS 4 alone it's not worth turning on IMO. The comparisons in graphics quality for the fire effects in particular seem stark, but not enough to remove smoothness.
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Not sure if it would be hard or easy to do but an only during cut scene (for MFG and PT graphic) option could be interesting, latency added by MFG do not count, artifact if they are there is the only issue and for a game like this you want high FPS/low latency when you play usually.

With game usually having some form of game engine cut scene more and more, it could be a natural use with lower downside of MFG
 
The path tracing in that video looks like ray tracing in other games. Will try to play it this weekend, so at least the update will be out but doubt a 5070ti will handle it well.
 
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