The DOOM Open Beta finished earlier this week and thanks to your
participation over the course of the weekend, we got a lot of great
information. The server backend infrastructure held up really well to
the load, and we got all of the data we need in preparation for the
worldwide launch on May 13. Based on your feedback we had already made
a considerable number of updates and improvements between the Closed
Betas and Open Beta, and we appreciate all the additional feedback you
shared with us during the Open Beta.
In particular we got a lot of feedback from the PC community with
regards to capped framerates, monitor support, multi-monitor support
and other PC features that weren’t emphasized in the Beta for various
development reasons. So to clarify: At launch the PC framerate will not
be capped. Further, the PC version of DOOM will expose a comprehensive
set of advanced game and rendering options that will allow players to
dial the experience up or down based on their individual desires or
hardware capabilities.
PC gaming is in our DNA here at id. Just like so many of you, we
also love to tinker with settings to get the exact experience we want –
and every ounce of performance our systems can handle. We will be
running an uncapped framerate on PC at launch, supporting ultra-wide
21:9 monitors, allowing wider FOV, and providing a wide variety of
advanced settings that allows any PC connoisseur the opportunity to
make intelligent tradeoffs between visual fidelity and performance.
We also know many of you are interested in some deeper insight into
the types of fundamental changes we’ve made to our engine technology
over the last few years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be giving you an
inside look at idTech 6 engine architecture, our rendering pipeline,
our customization tech and other initiatives we have underway to
broaden our minimum PC spec even further than our current expectations.
Our current expected PC advanced settings include:
- Manually Lock Framerate (un-locked by default)
- Lights Quality
- Chromatic Aberration Toggle
- Shading Quality
- Post Process Quality
- Particles Quality
- Game F/X Quality
- Decal Quality
- Directional Occlusion
- Reflections Quality
- Depth of Field Toggle
- Decal / Texture Filtering
- Motion Blur Quality / Toggle
- Sharpening Amount
- Lens Flare Toggle
- Lens Dirt Toggle
- Texture Atlas Size
- Show Performance Metrics
- Resolution Scaling
- UI Opacity
- Film Grain
- Rendering Mode
- FOV Slider
- Simple Reticle
- Show First-person Hands Toggle
- Use Compute Shaders
- Vsync (support or triple buffering)
Thank you again for the feedback and support. We hope that,
regardless of your preferred platform, you come back to learn more
about the technical work we’ve done on DOOM. We’re excited to share it.