Doom Eternal with ray tracing and DLSS in the test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

Doom Eternal can now raytracing and DLSS. ComputerBase clarifies what that brings in the fast first-person shooter. The test shows that the performance is still very good, but the memory consumption increases massively – and graphics cards with 8 GB get problems.

Doom Eternal (Test) is now almost a year and a half old and it took just as long for the game to receive an update with ray tracing after the announcement. The time has finally come and the fast first-person shooter now not only supports ray tracing for the reflections on GeForce RTX and Radeon RX 6000, but also Nvidia’s intelligent AI upsampling DLSS. In a test, ComputerBase clarifies how well both work in Doom Eternal.

The ray traced reflections look chic

Doom Eternal uses ray tracing in id Tech 7 only for the reflections. Unlike, for example, in Watch Dogs: Legion (test), id Software is much more cautious about it and the game world does not reflect inflationary. As a result, in many scenes you can hardly see the ray tracing at all and the technology only slightly supports the graphics quality.

Some rooms, on the other hand, reflect significantly more and here the optics can really stand out from the variant with exclusively used classic SSR reflections and cube maps. And since Doom Eternal doesn’t take place in the real world, that’s not annoying either – the game doesn’t have to look realistic, which is why there is no problem with wacky and exaggerated scenes.

Ray tracing is not used excessively in Doom Eternal. If only because many surfaces are rather matt and therefore not one piano lacquer mirror follows the next. This works particularly well in the numerous fights with many dynamic effects that are captured well by the ray tracing reflections. That looks pretty spectacular in places.

The benefit is greatest in combat

And the latter is the real advantage of ray tracing in the game. Because Doom Eternal is way too fast to look great at the better reflections – quiet sequences are a rarity. But ray tracing captures the particle effects of the fights well, which the player gets along with in battle. The rasterizing reflections do a good job in this regard, but not at the level of the RT reflections. For optical reasons, ray tracing should be used in Doom Eternal.

The RT reflections are not perfect

Ray tracing isn’t perfect in Doom Eternal. For performance reasons, the RT reflections are still supported by the SSR and cube map reflections. These look better with ray tracing, but the hybrid reflections are not error-free. In addition, they are calculated with a maximum of half the set resolution (lower reflection levels of detail reduce them further). This doesn’t matter at all in battles and makes sense for performance reasons. But if you take a closer look at the reflections, you will notice the reduced resolution.

A lot of VRAM is needed for ray tracing – more than 8 GB

Ray tracing always requires graphics card memory and accordingly there are more and more games in which 3D accelerators with only 8 GB of VRAM run into problems. This also applies to Doom Eternal. While 8 GB is sufficient for maximum details without ray tracing, this no longer applies with activated ray reflections. Problems then arise even in Full HD. The game runs flawlessly from 10 GB.

Doom Eternal works with a different memory management than other titles. To prevent performance problems, Doom Eternal does not even allow a “texture pool setting” that is set too large. Without ray tracing, the game directly suppresses the highest setting “Ultra Nightmare” with a 6 GB graphics card, it is only from 8 GB Usable up to and including Ultra HD. With activated ray tracing, the shooter automatically increases the memory requirements by around 1.3 GB, which has a major impact.

The full texture pool is not available in Full HD either

If the graphics card only has 8 GB, “Ultra Nightmare” cannot be selected in Ultra HD, but the highest details can be used up to and including WQHD. As benchmarks will show below, this has a massive negative impact on performance. This is also available with the lower setting “Nightmare”, only the texture pool on “Ultra” runs properly on an 8 GB graphics card – but only up to and including WQHD. “Ultra” can be set differently than “Nightmare” with an 8 GB graphics card in Ultra HD, but the full speed is only available from a texture pool on “High”.

To be fair, it must have been noted that “Ultra Nightmare” and “Nightmare” have no discernible advantages in terms of texture quality in Doom Eternal – at least none of the editors noticed. Simply turn up the quality and enjoy in Doom Eternal with an 8 GB graphics card, even if the raw performance of many 8 GB models would be sufficient for this. And if the texture pool is only turned back one level, there are performance problems. If you don’t explicitly deal with it in Doom Eternal, you will only have a suboptimal gaming experience.

In addition, textures occasionally visibly reload when the texture pool is set to “High”. This limits the quality of a GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti at the latest. The computing power of the graphics cards is high enough for Ultra HD, but full graphics quality is still not available on the models.

Those are the differences in performance with 8 GB of VRAM

With the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which is used as a substitute for 8 GB graphics cards, the performance with texture pool to “Ultra Nightmare” is already massively reduced in Full HD. But the “Nightmare” setting doesn’t work much better either, in 1,920 × 1,080 the average frame rate increases by 8 percent, the percentile FPS by 23 percent. Since Doom Eternal needs a high frame rate for a really smooth gaming experience, the feel of the game is not good even with “Nightmare”.

It gets a lot better with the Ultra setting. In Full HD the frame rate improves by 88 percent, in WQHD it is 63 percent. And then Doom Eternal suddenly also runs properly in WQHD on the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which is not even possible in Full HD with the ultra nightmare and nightmare setting. Further reduced texture details then no longer bring any increase.

Graphics cards with 8 GB VRAM are slowed down in 3840 × 2160, but also with the ultra setting. If the texture pool is reduced to “high” again, the frame rate increases by 15 percent.

On the next page: Benchmarks with ray tracing and DLSS as well as the conclusion