Doom: The Dark Ages requires a GPU with ray tracing

An official release date for Doom: The Dark Ages was announced today at the Xbox Developer Direct. Along with the May 15 release announcement, developer Software released the PC requirements for the game. Like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is also built on the idTech engine, it looks like Doom: The Dark Ages will prove to be a demanding game even with the best and newest graphics cards.

And it looks like Doom: The Dark Ages will be a demanding game even with the best and newest graphics cards.

You can check out the full system requirements below. You’ll need an 8GB graphics card to run the game, but that’s a very basic and basic requirement for a game coming out in 2025. Interestingly, an 8GB graphics card will only give you 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080p with the “Low Graphics” preset. That’s a bit of a problem considering other powerful GPUs like the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 3070 are stuck with 8GB of video memory.

So you’ll have to wait for the 8GB of video memory.

Even the lowest level requires a GPU with ray tracing support, which excludes anything older than Nvidia’s RTX 20 series and AMD’s RX 6000 GPUs.

For higher graphics settings, system requirements call for at least 10GB, though a 12GB graphics card like the RX 7700 XT would still be a better option. If you want to up your game resolution to 4K, you’ll need 16GB, which excludes all GPUs except flagship cards like the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4080 Super, and of course the new RTX 5090 with 32GB of memory.

But it’s worth noting that such high requirements aren’t surprising. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle showed just how demanding idTech’s modern engine is on VRAM, and 8GB just isn’t enough for a comfortable game. Fortunately, the engine uses a texture streaming model that allows it to fit within 8GB of VRAM at the Low graphics preset, and it doesn’t result in a complete degradation of image quality. Rather than simply using low-resolution textures, the game more actively streams them at high resolution, ensuring image quality and performance in equal measure.

The game’s texture streaming model is more proactive in ensuring that the image quality and performance are equally good.

In addition to VRAM requirements, Doom: The Dark Ages also needs a GPU with ray tracing hardware. According to Nvidia’s Jacob Freeman, the game will support path tracing as well as DLSS 4.

According to Nvidia’s Jacob Freeman.

While idTech has established itself as a remarkably stable engine through its pioneering use of Vulkan, it’s also been at the center of the VRAM debate lately. Doom: The Dark Ages may not be able to run on graphics cards with 8GB of memory at high graphics settings, but we’re hoping it will provide a smooth and stable experience when playing the new installment of Doom. Maybe for some people the initial specifications will be enough.