What are the best Doom The Dark Ages settings for PC and Steam Deck? Whether you're killing hellspawn with firearms, a shield, or your fists, Doom The Dark Ages is gloriously gory, and getting great performance shouldn't be too difficult as long as your gaming PC can handle the baked-in ray tracing demands.
Thanks to the in-depth Doom The Dark Ages.
Best Doom The Dark Ages settings for PC
- Refresh Rate: Match monitor maximum
- VSync: Off
- Present From Compute: On
- Field of View: 110
- Chromatic Aberration: On
- Depth of Field: On
- Sharpening: 1.50
- Film Grain: 0.90
- Upscaler: Nvidia DLSS
- DLSS Super Resolution: Quality
- DLSS Frame Generation: 2x
- Nvidia Reflex Mode: On
- Motion Blur: On
- Motion Blur Amount: Low
- Motion Blur Quality: High
- Shadow Quality: High
- Reflections Quality: High
- Lights Quality: High
- Particles Quality: High
- Decal Quality: High
- Water Quality: High
- Volumetrics Quality: High
- Texture Filtering Quality: High
- Geometric Quality: High
- Directional Quality: High
Using the above settings, we were able to achieve an average frame rate of 129fps, with a 1% low of 60fps, on our RTX 4070 testing rig. For a single-player shooter, this is more than able, but if you wanted to push even higher, our rig achieved a 129fps average with 53fps 1% low when the graphical preset was upped to Ultra.
While there are timing elements to the combat in Doom The Dark Ages, enabling frame generation didn't appear to add any kind of input lag, at least not to the point where it felt disruptive.
As for the image quality across the presets, there's very little difference between the High and Ultra options, with the main difference being the quality of lighting. This is the same when you move up to the Nightmare and Ultra Nightmare presets too.
It's once you move down to the Medium and Low presets that quality starts to deteriorate at a more noticeable rate. Jagged and blurred edges, as well as a distinct loss of quality at a distance, are the main compromises for very little return in of frames. Doom The Dark Ages still looks great even at lower settings, however, so it will come down to what works best for your gaming PC.
Dropping to the Low graphical preset only upped the average frame rate to 141fps, with the 1% lows creeping up to 70fps. It's an improvement for sure, but given how great Doom The Dark Ages looks when you push it graphically, it's worth losing a little bit of performance for a better quality image.
Best Doom The Dark Ages setting for Steam Deck
- VSync: Off
- Present From Compute: On
- Field of View: 90
- Chromatic Aberration: Off
- Depth of Field: Off
- Sharpening: 1.70
- Film Grain: 1.00
- Upscaler: AMD FSR
- FSR: Performance
- Frame Generation: Off
- Motion Blur: On
- Motion Blur Amount: Low
- Motion Blur Quality: Low
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Reflections Quality: Low
- Lights Quality: Low
- Particles Quality: Low
- Decal Quality: Low
- Water Quality: Low
- Volumetrics Quality: Low
- Texture Filtering Quality: Low
- Geometric Quality: Low
- Directional Quality: Low
Currently, Doom The Dark Ages does not run well on the Steam Deck, but it is playable, if you can get it to launch. This was my fear once the system requirements were released and it became clear the game would require a ray-tracing GPU. An 8GB VRAM card as the minimum requirement is also a push for the handheld.
Using the above settings, which are about as extreme as is possible without completely destroying the image quality, I still wasn't able to achieve an entirely stable 30fps, and once combat started, performance would tank even further. It could be that a Proton update aids performance, but this isn't worth placing too much hope on.
Post-release game updates are always worth keeping an eye on, however, and we could see a similar update to the one just deployed in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where a Steam Deck-specific texture pool size option for the Steam Deck. This will help prevent VRAM issues and crashes.
Doom The Dark Ages accessibility settings
There are a ton of accessibility settings available in Doom The Dark Ages, including but not limited to a colorblind mode, subtitles, font scaling, and difficulty modifiers.
Very few options are actually housed under the dedicated accessibility menu, with the colorblind options hiding in the display settings and the difficulty modifiers having their own menu.
How we tested Doom The Dark Ages
At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig used to play Doom The Dark Ages includes the following components: Intel Core i7-11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration, and MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Windows 11 64-bit.
We always run our testing first at 1,920 x 1,080 to identify the best settings for this entry-level resolution, then again at 2,560 x 1,440 using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.
Does Doom The Dark Ages need an SSD?
Doom The Dark Ages requires an SSD, regardless of whether you're aiming for the minimum or recommended system requirements. Upgrading to one of the best gaming SSD options would really help keep game loading times in check and help you get the chunky 100GB game file ed much quicker.
How to monitor performance in Doom The Dark Ages
If you want to keep an eye on performance in Doom The Dark Ages, we have an easy method that works whether you're using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.
For Nvidia cards, ensure you have the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.
Alternatively, you can free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.
With handheld gaming PCs, most will have a dedicated button to access a quick menu from which performance monitoring, sometimes called real-time monitoring, can be accessed.
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