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Doom Eternal Update 6 in the test: High FPS with ray tracing want a lot of graphics memory

Jul 8, 2021

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Doom Eternal can now raytracing and DLSS. ComputerBase clarifies what that brings in the fast first-person shooter. The test shows that the performance is still very good, but the memory consumption increases massively – and graphics cards with 8 GB get problems.

Table of contents

1 High FPS with ray tracing want a lot of graphics memory
1. The ray tracing reflections look nice
2. A lot of VRAM is needed for ray tracing – more than 8 GB
2 benchmarks with ray tracing and DLSS as well as the conclusion
1. The test system and the benchmark scene
2. Ray tracing benchmarks in full HD, WQHD and Ultra HD
3. DLSS shows advantages and disadvantages in Doom Eternal
4. Conclusion

Doom Eternal (Test) is now almost a year and a half old and it took just as long for the game to receive an update with ray tracing after the announcement. The time has finally come and the fast first-person shooter now not only supports ray tracing for the reflections on GeForce RTX and Radeon RX 6000, but also Nvidia's intelligent AI upsampling DLSS. ComputerBase tests how well both work in Doom Eternal.

The raytracing reflections look nice

Doom Eternal uses ray tracing in id Tech 7 only for the reflections. Unlike, for example, in Watch Dogs: Legion (Test), id Software is much more cautious about it and the game world does not reflect inflationary. As a result, in many scenes you hardly see the ray tracing at all and the technology only slightly supports the graphics quality.

Some rooms, on the other hand, reflect significantly more, and here the optics can clearly set themselves apart from the variant with exclusively used classic SSR reflections and cube maps. And since Doom Eternal doesn't take place in the real world, that's not annoying either – the game doesn't have to look realistic, which is why there is no problem with wacky and exaggerated scenes.

Ray tracing is not used excessively in Doom Eternal. If only because many surfaces are rather matt and therefore one piano lacquer mirror does not follow the next. This works particularly well in the numerous fights with many dynamic effects that are captured well by the ray tracing reflections. That looks pretty spectacular in places.

The benefit is greatest in combat

And the latter is the real advantage of ray tracing in the game. Because Doom Eternal is way too fast to look great at the better reflections – quiet sequences are a rarity. But ray tracing captures the particle effects of the fights well, which the player can see on the side in battle. The rasterizing reflections do a good job in this regard, but not at the level of the RT reflections. For optical reasons, ray tracing should be used in Doom Eternal.

The RT reflections are not perfect

Ray tracing is not perfect in Doom Eternal. For performance reasons, the RT reflections are still supported by the SSR and cube map reflections. These look better with ray tracing, but the hybrid reflections are not error-free. In addition, they are calculated with a maximum of half the set resolution (lower reflection levels of detail reduce them further). This doesn't matter at all in combat and makes sense for performance reasons. But if you take a closer look at the reflections, you will notice the reduced resolution.