DOOM: The Dark Ages — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 5% fps cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, we recommend Texture Quality at High (5% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: id Tech 8 uses a megatexture-heritage streaming system with modern virtual texturing. At Ultra, 4K surface atlases are streamed into a texture pool that demands roughly 2–3 GB of VRAM on its own — stack this with RT and you risk evictions at 8 GB on 1440p. Medium and High look nearly identical in motion during fast-paced combat; only static inspection of stone walls and armor detail reveals the gap. Drop to Medium if VRAM pressure is causing hitches.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: id Tech 8 renders cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun/moon light and a large number of dynamic punctual lights in indoor arena spaces. Ultra increases both cascade resolution and the shadow map texel budget for dynamic lights spawned by explosions and demon abilities. The dense geometry of castle corridors and open siege fields both stress shadow rendering differently — outdoor scenes are cascade-heavy, indoor arenas are punctual-light-heavy. High is the practical ceiling before frame-time variance becomes noticeable.

Typical impact 5-15% · 8% fps cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, we recommend Lighting Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls the overall fidelity of the deferred or forward+ lighting pipeline. Higher settings increase the maximum number of dynamic lights evaluated per tile/cluster in the light culling compute shader, enable higher-precision light attenuation functions, and may add area light support with linearly-transformed cosine (LTC) approximations. In clustered deferred renderers, this also affects the cluster grid resolution and the number of lights allowed per cluster before overflow.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: id Tech 8's lighting system is heavily fill-rate-bound. Ultra adds significant GPU load with strong visual returns in dark interior levels. High is the recommended sweet spot.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (6% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: id Tech 8 uses a continuous LOD system for environment geometry and enemy meshes. Ultra holds full-detail meshes at distances that rarely matter during combat — the Slayer never stops to admire distant ramparts at full resolution. The frame-time impact concentrates in open exterior levels like the siege fields and dragon-flight sequences, where large numbers of high-poly debris, armor, and structure meshes are simultaneously on screen. High is indistinguishable from Ultra in the frantic pacing of typical combat arenas.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, we recommend Water Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Governs the fidelity of water surface rendering including wave simulation, tessellation, refraction, and reflection techniques. Higher settings enable GPU-computed FFT wave simulation in compute shaders, adaptive tessellation for displacement mapping on the water mesh, screen-space refraction via distorted depth buffer sampling, and planar or screen-space reflections. The reflection pass may render the scene a second time from a mirrored viewpoint, effectively doubling draw calls for visible water surfaces.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: The Dark Ages features water in moat areas, flooded dungeon floors, and coastal siege environments. Ultra enables full FFT-based wave displacement with screen-space refraction and a planar reflection pass that re-renders the scene geometry from a mirrored camera. Medium drops to a simpler displacement model with cubemap reflections, cutting the cost significantly while retaining convincing visual results at combat pace. Water surfaces rarely occupy large screen fractions in this game, so the Ultra-to-High saving is proportionally smaller than in open-world titles.

Typical impact 3-15% · 8% fps cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, we recommend Effect Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: DOOM: The Dark Ages relies heavily on VFX — demon dissolve sequences, weapon charge effects, shield impacts, and large-scale siege explosions all pile particle overdraw onto the GPU simultaneously. Ultra increases per-emitter particle counts, enables mesh particles for debris, and spawns temporary dynamic point lights from each explosion for local illumination. In dense arena encounters with multiple demons active, Ultra effect quality can spike frame time by 4–6 ms relative to Medium, making it one of the more volatile settings during intense combat.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: id Tech 8's path tracing mode (added June 2025 patch) roughly halves framerate — RTX 4090 drops from 115fps to 58fps at 1080p. For a 60fps target on most hardware, keep RT at Low or Off and use DLSS Quality instead.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: id Tech 8 provides full DLSS 3 integration including Super Resolution and Frame Generation on Ada/Blackwell hardware. The engine correctly provides high-quality motion vectors and an exposure buffer, which keeps DLSS reconstruction stable even on fast-moving demon geometry. Quality mode renders at ~67% of native pixels — at 1440p this means internally rendering at roughly 960p, recovering significant frame time while the Tensor Core upscale retains weapon and armor edge detail well. Balanced or Performance are recommended when path tracing is enabled.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: FSR 3 in DOOM: The Dark Ages uses temporal accumulation with id Tech 8's native motion vector output and depth buffer, matching DLSS in input quality on the upscaling side. On AMD RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 hardware, FSR 3 Frame Generation is also available, making this the primary performance path for non-NVIDIA players. Quality mode at 1440p provides a very strong result on the game's detailed but geometrically coherent surfaces. FSR's compute-based upscale runs on standard shader units, adding a small but measurable compute overhead compared to DLSS Tensor Core inference.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, the recommended preset leaves Intel XeSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Intel Xe Super Sampling — a temporal upscaling technology that uses machine learning inference to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution input. On Intel Arc GPUs, XeSS runs on dedicated XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) AI accelerator hardware. On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to a DP4a (dot product of 4 8-bit integers) shader implementation that runs on standard compute units. The neural network takes the current low-resolution color buffer, motion vectors, depth, and responsive masks as input. Quality mode renders at ~77% of native, Performance at ~50%.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: XeSS in DOOM: The Dark Ages runs in DP4a fallback mode on non-Intel GPUs, using standard compute shader inference. On Intel Arc Battlemage hardware, XMX matrix units accelerate the reconstruction network. id Tech 8's clean motion vector and depth buffer output gives XeSS good temporal stability. Quality mode is recommended — Performance mode produces noticeable softness on the intricate Gothic stonework and demon surface detail that characterizes the art direction. XeSS is a competent choice for Intel Arc users and a reasonable fallback when neither DLSS nor FSR Frame Generation is available.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In DOOM: The Dark Ages, the recommended preset leaves Frame Generation off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Synthesizes entirely new intermediate frames between real rendered frames using optical flow analysis. DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) uses the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to compute per-pixel motion between consecutive frames, then a neural network generates a synthetic frame by warping and blending the two surrounding real frames. AMD FSR Frame Generation uses a software-based optical flow compute shader implementation. The generated frame is inserted between real frames, effectively doubling perceived framerate. The trade-off is approximately 1 frame of additional display latency and potential artifacts on fast-moving objects where optical flow estimation fails.

In DOOM: The Dark Ages: DOOM: The Dark Ages supports DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) and FSR 3 Frame Generation (AMD). Because id Tech 8 is heavily GPU-bound at high quality settings, frame generation is most effective here — the GPU is already saturated, so synthesized frames meaningfully raise perceived framerate. NVIDIA Reflex is integrated and should remain enabled alongside frame generation to partially offset the added display latency from interpolated frames. Avoid frame generation below roughly 50 real rendered fps, as optical flow artifacts on fast projectiles and demon motion become objectionable.