Doom: The Dark Ages will send your GPU to hell next month with its path tracing update

1 month ago 4

Summary

Path tracing in Doom: The Dark Ages will be added in June, enhancing visual quality significantly.
Nvidia's DLSS Ray Reconstruction feature is being added, improving ray-traced lighting details and performance.
Despite missing path tracing at launch, Doom: The Dark Ages demonstrates the power of the id Tech 8 engine.

Doom: The Dark Ages has launched to critical acclaim, as you can read in our own Doom: The Dark Ages review. But something was missing at launch. Despite showing off the technical marvel that is the id Tech 8 engine, The Dark Ages shipped without support for path tracing, which was originally promised. You won't have to wait too much longer for the update, thankfully. Nvidia says The Dark Ages will get support for path tracing in June.

As if the game didn't look great already

Doom: The Dark Ages uses id Tech 8, and it's designed around ray tracing. You won't find that option in the graphics menu, and that's because the game requires an RT-capable GPU for reflections and global illumination. This path tracing update pushes that idea further, fully simulating the light in each scene. As you can see from the screenshots provided by Nvidia, path tracing makes a massive difference in visual quality. That's not surprising given what we've seen the tech do in games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Black Myth: Wukong.

Alongside path tracing, Nvidia is adding its DLSS Ray Reconstruction feature to the game. Ray Reconstruction is the unsung hero of the suite of DLSS features, serving as an AI-powered ray tracing denoiser in a select number of games. It does wonders for preserving the fine details that show up with ray-traced lighting, and in some cases, it can even give you a slight performance bump.

Although we now have a timeframe for The Dark Age's path tracing update, we still don't have a date. Nvidia simply revealed that the update is arriving in June. Regardless of when it shows up, it'll be a free update for all PC versions of Doom: The Dark Ages.

Even without path tracing, Doom: The Dark Ages has already shown how powerful the id Tech 8 engine really is. Despite always-on ray tracing and VRAM demands that can easily outclass 8GB graphics cards at 1080p, the game runs like a beauty. A big part of that is the robust texture streaming system in the game, which dynamically adjusts the texture quality based on the VRAM you have available. The end result is a game that looks very similar across graphics settings and PC hardware. It just works, which is something you really can't say about the vast majority of PC releases.

Read Entire Article