Doom Eternal in the benchmark test – ComputerBase

– The successor to the Reboot Doom has been expected for a long time and has now appeared with Doom Eternal. The game has retained the virtues of its predecessor: there are tough, brutal and fast fights, a smooth game flow, very good graphics and still a very high performance.

After only two minutes it is clear: anyone who liked Doom from 2016 will also like the successor Doom Eternal. Maybe even a little more, because the press reviews overwhelm with praise. As usual, BitcoinMinersHashrate takes a look at the technology of the PC version and focuses on graphics card benchmarks.

id Tech 7 with many strengths and no weaknesses in Doom Eternal

For Doom Eternal, id Software has developed a new engine that is called id Tech7 and only uses the low-level API Vulkan. The developers managed to keep the strengths of the previous technology, do everything a little better and iron out the weaknesses. In short: id Tech 7 is certainly not "the perfect engine", but it is the perfect engine for Doom Eternal, which enables the incredible flow of graphics quality, smooth movement and direct control that no other game has.

Back to the actual graphics quality: Doom Eternal does not look beautiful and there are definitely titles that look better, but it looks very good throughout. Two things stand out positively here: There are no places or scenes in the game that fall optically and do not fit into the picture. The predecessor Doom had to struggle with bad textures in individual places. You don't have that in Doom Eternal And the artistic design of the game is unique. If you see screenshots of the game, you will immediately recognize that it is Doom Eternal.

Doom Eternal has become a surprisingly colorful game. This is criticized by some, but it does not detract from the atmosphere. It also highlights perhaps the greatest strength of the engine, because the many particle effects are spectacular. The animations, shadows and cutscenes also look great. The lighting is suitable for hell in Doom Eternal, but it also slows it down somewhat. Because, unlike in many other games, this cannot set a highlight. As a result, the graphics of Doom Eternal are missing the last bit.

Many graphics options, but not perfect

Doom Eternal has an extensive graphics menu. However, it is not a "state of the art" menu, as Ubisoft brings it from time to time. Sample screenshots and information texts that deal with the influence of the individual points are missing, as are some convenience functions such as an FPS limiter.

On the credit side, in addition to graphic presets, Doom Eternal offers a special mode for color blind people, an internal option for resharpening and a possibility to scale the resolution. The latter has two options: On the one hand, a static resolution scale, in which a free percentage between 50 to 100 percent is set. The resolution is then reduced to this value, so there is classic upsampling – downsampling for better graphics quality, however, does not exist.

On the other hand, a dynamic mode, in which a frame rate between 60 and 1000 FPS, the FPS maximum of the game, is set. However, the option does not make everything pixel-wide to achieve 1000 FPS, but is rather timid. The change from 3,840 × 2,160 to 2,560 × 1,440 needed a greater performance boost than in Ultra HD to set the dynamic resolution to the maximum.

An extensive performance overlay

Doom Eternal again has a performance overlay that can display a lot of information. From FPS, Min and Max FPS to frame times, gradients and more. If you only want to see the frame rate, you can also do this, because the overlay can be activated in different levels.

The presets don't make much difference

With "Low", "Medium", "High", "Ultra", "Nightmare" and "Ultra Nightmare", Doom Eternal offers six different presets to adapt the graphics quality to your own computer. You can switch back and forth between them without a restart, which is an improvement over the old engine.

The optical differences between nightmare and ultra nightmare have to be looked for with a magnifying glass. Yes, they do exist, but the few objects in the game are not noticeable, which are no longer shown in such detail. Because even on screenshots you have to look pretty closely. Ultra turns exactly the same screw, because exactly the same changes are shown in the same places, only these are now a little more pronounced. But even that is not noticeable when playing, so you can switch back to Ultra without hesitation in the event of performance problems.

From the High setting, the differences are noticeable, especially at medium and long distances, details are lost. The shadows and the surrounding masking suffer the most. With the two lowest settings, the effects are even greater; reflections, surface details and textures are also affected. Overall, the graphic effects of the presets are visible, but not very large.

There is also little change in performance

If it doesn't work, it doesn't cost anything. So you could sum it up for Doom Eternal. Because whether Ultra Nightmare or Ultra is used only makes a difference of four percent on the Radeon RX 5700 XT and only three percent on the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. High brings another four percent on the Radeon, the same applies to the GeForce. Medium and low bring at least a boost of six and seven percent for AMD and nine and seven percent for Nvidia. In other words, those who have FPS problems in Doom Eternal will not get very far with the presets. But that should rarely be the case.

The anti-aliasing is very good, but blurred in Full HD

The post-processing anti-aliasing used by id Software in Doom Eternal is always activated and cannot be switched off. This is a good thing, because it works very effectively and covers almost all objects. The picture quality is very good even in Full HD, from WQHD it is actually perfect. However, there is blurring in low resolutions such as 1,920 × 1,080. This can either be reduced with the game's own sharpness filter or – better – with AMD RIS or Nvidia's sharpness filter in the driver. Then the picture is sometimes not quite as flicker-free, but that's a good exchange.

The textures are good and don't need too much memory

Doom Eternal has much nicer textures than the predecessor Doom or all games with the old id-Tech-7 engine. However, this did not increase memory consumption, because an 8 GB graphics card easily handles the highest texture details in Ultra HD. The memory allocation that can be read out using external tools can be ignored in Doom Eternal. The game automatically reserves a certain amount, which has nothing to do with its actual use.

The game is strictly limited – 2 GB is not enough for Full HD

It should also be noted that the game does not even allow the memory to run out. If a graphics card has too little memory, the problematic texture level cannot be activated. Full texture details in Ultra HD are only available from 8 GB. With a 6 GB card, the ultra nightmare textures cannot be activated even in Full HD. There is nothing more than nightmare in 1,920 × 1,080. Ultra is the maximum in 2,560 × 1,440, as is 3,840 × 2,160. Playing with a 4 GB card is even stricter. More than medium textures are no longer possible even in Full HD, but at least then also work in WQHD. Only in Ultra HD are the worst textures a must have. For graphics cards with 2 GB there is only one setting to be able to use Full HD at all: the low preset, everything else does not work.

On the next page: GPU benchmarks and frame times