"Doom: The Dark Ages" runs with forced ray tracing

If you want to play “Doom: The Dark Ages”, you need ray tracing-capable hardware. This was announced by developer id Software in a blog entry that lists the hardware requirements for the upcoming shooter. Even the minimum requirements for full HD include a GPU with ray tracing capability and 8 GB of VRAM – “Doom: The Dark Ages” will not run on a lawnmower for now.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique in which rays from the camera scan a virtual space. Compared to traditional raster rendering, ray tracing enables much more realistic lighting, reflections and shadows. However, the performance costs are significantly higher. In “Doom: The Dark Ages”, lighting and shadows will be rendered using ray tracing, writes developer id Software.

For a long time, ray tracing was an optional extra for enthusiastic PC gamers with modern hardware in their system. In recent months, however, several games have come onto the market that inevitably run with ray tracing. Some, such as “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora”, can at least theoretically run without suitable hardware because they can also calculate ray tracing on the software side. Others, such as “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle”, require ray tracing hardware.

Developers can concentrate on ray tracing

For developers, the permanent switch to ray tracing primarily means resource savings: they can concentrate on a single lighting model and do not have to work on two tracks. At the same time, environments can be created with ray tracing technology in mind right from the start, which could lead to more coherent results than in games where ray tracing was only an optional appendage. This can also lead to better optimization.

Despite its visual benefits, ray tracing is controversial in the gaming community – mainly because the performance requirements are so high. However, games such as “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” and “Doom The Dark Ages” show that ray tracing is becoming the standard in the industry.

Ray-tracing-capable graphics cards have been available since the beginning of 2019, when the RTX 20 generation from Nvidia came onto the market. AMD graphics cards have supported ray tracing since the RX 6600. Intel graphics cards support ray tracing, as do current handheld PCs such as the Steam Deck. In addition to ray tracing graphics cards, “Doom The Dark Ages” requires at least 16 GB of RAM and 100 GB of SSD storage space.

(dahe)