Doom: The Dark Ages will impress with even more graphics: path tracing is already available on PC

Doom: The Dark Ages already looks stunning, thanks to the ray tracing capabilities of the latest iteration of the idTech engine. But if you're playing on PC, you'll be able to unlock the true potential of the graphics with the long-awaited path tracing update! Get ready for unrivalled visual quality, but be prepared to sacrifice a significant amount of performance.

Here's What We Know

For those unfamiliar, path tracing is a form of ray tracing that simulates how light rays bounce off surfaces. It's a much more demanding technology: objects emit more rays, and those rays can bounce around the scene multiple times, resulting in much more accurate lighting, better ambient dimming, and better reflections and approximations of surface materials. When implemented correctly, this makes a huge difference compared to standard ray tracing methods, although it is only available on some of the best graphics cards on the market.

Path tracing can dramatically change the look of Doom: The Dark Ages, especially if you find the right scene to compare it to, and it seems to benefit interiors the most. Light bounces and illuminates objects in ways that standard ray tracing can't, while the contrast between areas where there should be light and where there definitely shouldn't is more naturally defined. Digital Foundry has published an extensive review of the many improvements that path tracing provides, which gives you a good idea of whether the additional visual upgrade is worthwhile.

However, you will have to sacrifice a significant amount of performance to take advantage of path tracing, even if you limit which game objects use it. You'll be making heavy use of Nvidia DLSS or frame generation to keep the action smooth. Tom's Guide claims that performance dropped by 40% on the benchmark RTX 5070Ti.

This means that only owners of the RTX 770i will be able to truly enjoy the path tracing in Doom: The Dark Ages will only be available to owners of the most powerful PCs. However, if your hardware is up to the task, you'll get an incredible visual experience that will highlight the game's brutality and atmosphere like never before.

Source: DF