We Tested Doom: The Dark Ages PC Performance on the RTX 5070 Ti

Source: Bethesda and id Software

Doom: The Dark Ages — out May 15, 2025, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC — is id Software and Bethesda’s intense new take on the classic shooter. Prequel to Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal — The Dark Ages, leaves behind its futuristic sci-fi setting and dives into a gritty, medieval world filled with dark castles and brutal battles. But don’t worry — it’s still very much a Doom game in all its essence. The Doom Slayer now fights with a shield-saw and rides into battle on a demon-slaying warhorse, bringing new twists to the familiar chaos. It’s a fresh direction that keeps the fast-paced, violent gameplay fans love, just wrapped in a darker, bloodier setting.

On PC, Doom: The Dark Ages is a visual and technical showcase, just like you’d expect from id Software. Big gothic cathedrals, blazing fire effects, waves of enemies, and massive explosions are all capable of running smoothly, provided you have a decked-up system. The game comes with forced ray tracing, so to achieve 60fps at 4K on Ultra settings, you’ll be required to have at least an RTX 4080 or RX 7900XT. Nvidia says they have worked closely with Bethesda and id Software to bring DLSS 4, which means it also has the headlining feature, multi-frame generation, or what most people like to call fake frames. To test just that, I’ve used Zotac Gaming’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Let’s dive right in.

Doom: The Dark Ages PC System Requirements

id Software has delivered a detailed PC requirements list for Doom: The Dark Ages, tailored to three key performance tiers. The game supports modern upscaling technologies like NVIDIA DLSS 4, Intel XeSS and AMD FSR, helping maintain high frame rates without sacrificing visual clarity. Ray tracing is featured across all presets, with increasing VRAM demands from 8GB at minimum to 16GB for Ultra 4K. As expected from folks at id, optimisation is top-notch — the game runs fluidly and scales impressively across presets. While there’s no built-in benchmarks, Dark Ages does come with performance metric monitoring, which shows you real-time frames, latency, and more.

Doom: The Dark Ages PC Minimum Requirements for Low Graphics (1080p at 60fps)

Doom: The Dark Ages PC Recommended Requirements for High Graphics (1440p at 60fps)

Doom: The Dark Ages PC Recommended Requirements for Ultra Graphics (4K at 60fps)

Our Test Bench

We tested Assassin’s Creed Shadows on the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, which is built on the Zen 5 architecture and comes with 12 cores and 24 threads. The processor has a base clock speed of 4.4GHz and a boost of 5.6GHz. It also gets a 64MB L3 cache and a default TDP of 120W. This chip is cooled using the Antec Vortex 360 AIO.

For this performance piece, the 9900X sits on the MSI X670E Gaming Plus WiFi, which has a very unique finish that sets it apart from most of the other boards in the market. It comes with all the bells and whistles like an extended heatsink design, support for DDR5 memory, a PCIe 5.0 slot, and a wide array of I/O ports, one of which also includes a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C port.

RTX 5070 Ti

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Graphics duties are handled by Zotac Gaming’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti with 16GB VRAM.

These were accompanied by Kingston’s Fury Renegade 48GB non-binary RAM sticks running at 5600MT/s. Storage duties were handled by the WD Black SN850X, which is known to be one of the best gaming SSD options on the market. The game was run on the MSI G274F, a 180Hz 1080p gaming monitor.

Doom: The Dark Ages PC Graphics Settings and Features

Doom: The Dark Ages provides a comprehensive suite of graphics settings, allowing players to fine-tune their experience for optimal performance. Beyond standard presets, the game offers granular controls over textures, lighting, geometry, terrain, and more. Players can adjust texture pool size, shadow quality, reflections quality, volumetrics, and more to match their system’s capabilities. Doom: The Dark Ages supports a robust array of upscaling technologies, including Nvidia DLSS 4, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. Notably, DLSS 4 includes support for Multi Frame Generation, the headlining feature for the recently launched RTX 50-series GPUs. This allows you to choose between 2x, 3x and 4x interpolated frames per rendered frame. While the 2x feature is available on cards other than the 50-series, the rest are exclusive to the new lineup.

What is Multi-Frame Generation on the RTX 50-series GPUs?

Since a major chunk of this PC performance review of Doom: The Dark Ages includes numbers with multi-frame generation enabled at 4x, it’s important to understand what this tech actually means.

Also Read

MSP Explained: What is DLSS and How it Works?

Multi-frame generation is a feature headlining the RTX 50-series GPUs and is also exclusive to them. In essence, it’s frame generation, what we have seen in the past, on steroids. The major difference here is that, unlike earlier DLSS 3 frame generation, the 50-series cards can insert 2x, 3x, and even 4x frames — which essentially adds to the perceived frame rate figures. Perceived is the key word here. Instead of your graphics card drawing every single frame, it draws one and then adds an AI-generated frame in between the hardware-rendered frame. This way, it can create two, three, or even four extra frames.

This makes the game feel like it’s running at a much higher frame rate, even if the GPU isn’t working harder for each frame. It’s like filling in the gaps to make movement look extra smooth without needing more power.

Doom: The Dark Ages Performance on RTX 5070 Ti

Doom: The Dark Ages offers graphics presets ranging from Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Nightmare, and Ultra Nightmare. The game has been tested in low, ultra and ultra nightmare to test how it scales across different presets. Moreover, the tests also included a mix of TAA and DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation enabled at 4x. The table below will also give a closer look at the CPU package, GPU power, latency, 95th percentile, and 1% fps lows as well.

Doom: The Dark Ages runs fantastically on this rig, without a single bug or stutter. With a 1080p output and the RTX 5070 Ti, the Dark Ages ran above 100 fps across all the settings, including Ultra Nightmare. And, this is without any upscaling or frame generation trickery.

With the graphics preset set to Low, the game juiced about 99W of power from the Ryzen 9 9900X and 214W from the RTX 5070 Ti. Weirdly enough, this preset made the CPU also work quite hard, indicating there might be a bottleneck when the 9900X is paired with the 5070 Ti. This is actually a pattern across all the presets, but more prominent here. That aside, the game returned an average fps of 133, with excellent 1% low figures of 125fps, indicating consistent and smooth performance.

Performance metrics skyrocket to staggering levels when DLSS is enabled along with 4x multi-frame generation. In the same preset, the average fps reached 393, while the 1% low fps was at 352 fps. But what’s worth noting here is the 95th percentile fps, which reports only the real, non-generated frames, which would explain why it’s so much lower than the others. It reflects the actual “base” performance without frame generation, giving a more grounded view of system capability. One major issue with enabling multi-frame generation was the increased latency and input lag in games. This was negligible in all these tests. That said, some artefacts were slightly noticeable when trying to use the aim reticle. The frames were clearly not updating in real-time, and the struggle was noticeable. However, these were not prominent and did not cause any issues in the gameplay.

Interestingly, enabling 4x frame generation consistently reduces CPU utilisation by around 6–10% across all presets, showing clear CPU-side efficiency gains. GPU power draw also sees improvements; for example, Ultra Nightmare (TAA) peaks at 228W, while DLSS + 4x reduces that to 201W—despite much higher frame output. Input latency does increase slightly, with values creeping from ~26ms to ~31ms, but these are again negligible numbers and something I did not even notice when playing. Doom: The Dark Ages actually manages multi-frame generation quite well and in a systematic manner.

The Ultra Nightmare preset was also tested with 2x multi-frame generation, which is also available on the RTX 40-series cards. Here, you can get a fair bit of a jump in comparison to when disabled. The 1% lows and 95th percentile numbers also remain sane with 188 and 100fps, respectively. DLSS without frame generation in the Ultra Nightmare preset delivers only modest benefits by adding about 30 extra frames in comparison to TAA, reaffirming that multi-frame generation is doing much of the heavy lifting.

Doom: The Dark Ages looks stunning, showcasing exceptional ray-traced lighting and richly detailed environments across the battlefield. Intricate elements—like the textures on enemy armour, shields, and surrounding terrain—stand out clearly, highlighting the impressive level of visual fidelity across presets. If you have a 1080p monitor, and a capable rig, the Dark Ages can be enjoyed without any upscaling. At 4K, things will differ.

Overall, Doom: The Dark Ages delivers an outstanding PC experience, continuing id Software’s legacy of technical excellence. With robust optimisation across a range of hardware, support for modern features like ray tracing, DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and multi-frame generation, the game not only looks visually stunning but runs exceptionally well even under demanding presets.