DOOM Eternal is powered by id Tech 7, which is id Software's latest iteration of their famous graphics engine. The new version completely removes all OpenGL support and is Vulkan exclusive. This greatly simplifies development as code complexity has gone down and they no longer have to validate every feature for two platforms. DOOM Eternal features proper HDR support, and global illumination capabilities have been enhanced. The engine is now better equipped to handle open-world scenarios, possibly due to the removal of the MegaTexture pipeline. While that tech has given us super-crisp environment details in earlier titles, it was a huge disk space and memory hog.

Graphical fidelity of DOOM at the highest "Ultra Nightmare" setting is "good", maybe even "very good", but I'm not seeing anything that looks "next-gen". Many textures are blurry and some models definitely lack geometry. While the structural level design is amazing, I'd definitely have wished for more love when it comes to floor geometry and textures. It also puzzles me why they gave us six graphics presets yet built them in such a way that high-end hardware will be dishing out super high FPS (which could be traded for better graphics quality). Guess the good thing is that the performance hit from RTX Raytracing will not result in too low FPS. RTX support will be added in a later patch, one of the reasons being that Vulkan Raytracing support has just been released this week and NVIDIA only has had beta drivers out for a few days.

The level of customization for graphics and input settings is certainly high. This yields a lot of granularity in letting you fine-tune the game to your system. You may also adjust field of view and turn off post-processing effects like motion blur and sharpening. Both AMD and NVIDIA have released Game Ready drivers yesterday, which we used for all our testing—good to see that GPU companies got the gamers covered. We also used the public version of DOOM Eternal which includes a day 1 patch.

Hardware requirements are very modest overall—even at the highest setting. For fluid 1080p gaming even a RX 570 or GTX 1060 is sufficient. To achieve 60 FPS at 1440p, a GTX 1660 or RX 580 is enough! Some might say "good optimization"; I'm not denying it, but why not give gamers with the proper hardware the option to crank up the details? Even at 4K requirements are mild; a Radeon RX 5700 or RTX 2060 Super will be able to drive 60 FPS here. DOOM Eternal seems to be a posterchild to show off the improved capabilities of AMD's RDNA architecture, as the Radeon RX 5700 XT beats the Vega-based Radeon VII by quite a big margin at lower resolution. For 1440p and 4K, VRAM requirements are fine. We measured around 7-8 GB, which is something most graphics cards in this segment can handle just fine. At lower resolution, the Ultra Nightmare profile does require 7 GB VRAM, which means cards with 3 GB or 4 GB VRAM will be challenged. The good thing is that our results show no major loss of performance (due to VRAM) for GTX 1060 3 GB and RTX 570 4 GB. What's surprising is that the RX 5500 XT 4 GB is doing much worse than expected. My best guess is that AMD's VRAM management for Navi isn't as refined yet as that for Polaris. What could be a reason is that RX 5500 XT is only physically x8 PCI-Express lanes, which limits the bandwidth between CPU and GPU, whereas the GTX 1060 and RX 570 are x16 lane cards. At least the game doesn't crash when VRAM is exceeded, and continues to run just fine.