Yesterday on Twitter, Nvidia employee Jacob Freemansharedthe PC requirements for the upcomingDoom: The Dark Ages, highlighting that the latest id Tech 7 engine would enforce mandatory ray tracing a la the last one,Indiana Jones and The Great Circle.
The first id Tech 7 release,Doom Eternal, was built without an RT requirement but later retrofitted the feature as some RT effects, including reflections.Eternalwas otherwise incredibly performantdespite its cutting-edge visuals, to the point they even managed a feasible near-locked 30 FPS on the original Nintendo Switch’s anemic Tegra X1 chipset— though, of course, that version had no RT to speak of.
In any case, these minimum requirements will feel quite hefty for many users. While even some non-RT games have been demanding the likes of anRTX 2060 Superfor a while now,Doom Eternalcould be run on much weaker hardware, and the ray tracing baseline has also amped up CPU requirements to a minimum 10th Gen Core i7/Zen 2 Ryzen 7 tiering. And if you’re still using 8 GB of RAM for AAA gaming in 2025, you might as well go home.
Now, though, it seems id Tech 7 will get pushed to its limits inDoom: The Dark Ages— at least, if you plan to play above 60 FPS. These high-end 60 FPS requirements are much more reasonable than those forIndiana Jones, and it would even seem that full path tracing has been dodged in favor of increased performance while still rendering the entire game on a ray tracing pipeline. Considering how high these entry-level performance demands realistically are for most PC gamers, though, I doubt anyone will take issue withThe Dark Agesnot threatening our systems and/or egos with path-tracing presets.
That said, one can’t help but notice that all the existing recommended performance tiers forDoom: The Dark Agesonly show 60 FPS targets. For trueDoomenthusiasts withhigh refresh rate displays, there’s no question that you’ll want to push a higher framerate to enhance the fluidity of your gameplay further and give you precious reaction time in the frantic gunfights common to modernDoom.
This means those hoping to make the most of their 144-360 Hz displays inthisgame will need to kick up their CPU and GPU horsepower significantly overEternal’s demands and likely still turn down some settings from Ultra. For these purposes, we highly recommend theRyzen 7 9800X3Dor thebest gaming CPUyou can afford, paired with theRTX 4090, or…yes, the best (RT-enabled, thus Nvidia for this circumstance)gaming GPUyou can afford. If all you need is 60 FPS, you can get away with the existing recommended spec…but any PC FPS player knows that 60 FPS is just the beginning.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
