Tested: How does path tracing affect Doom: The Dark Ages’ sublime feel?

Doom: The Dark Ages is a masterclass in how to keep a high-end game smooth while delivering amazing graphics. But if you want to push it with the latest PC graphics, including ray tracing and frame generation, you can. Will Smith has, over on the PCWorld YouTube channel. Today he’s checking out the last update, which comes with a full benchmark mode to test full path tracing lighting.

If you caught Will’s earlier coverage of Doom: The Dark Ages, you know that micro-stutter (or a lack thereof) is a key part of the smooth movement and shooting in the game. Does turning on the intense, super-pretty path tracing lighting engine mess that up? Well…a little. Running at 85-90 frames per second, you’ll see microstutter of up 10-13 milliseconds of stutter. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to make things feel significantly less smooth than baseline (which has less impressive lighting).

What if you use those fancy frame generation tools in the latest Nvidia RTX 50-series cards? It helps, actually! With 2X frame generation (one “fake frame” for every rendered one), stutter is down below the 10ms mark with a lot less variance. Pumping it up to 4X frame generation with full path tracing things are even smoother, pushing it down below 5 milliseconds consistently. That’s a more than acceptable reaction time even for online shooters, but it’s an especially great result in a visually luscious single-player showcase like Doom.

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