Doom: The Dark Ages
Doom: The Dark Ages was released to PC in May of 2025 and uses the id Tech 8 game engine. This game features advanced graphics technologies, including path tracing, realistic lighting, reflections, and soft shadows. It has fully ray-marched volumetric effects with dynamic lighting and improved particle effects. It has detailed destructible environments, realistic water, and upscaling technologies such as DLSS 4. This is another one of those games that has ‘ray tracing’ enabled at all times, by default. You can optionally enable Path Tracing on top of it. We are going to utilize the game’s built-in benchmark level: Reckoning, but we will utilize Frameview to capture 1% Lows.
Native Resolution
In Doom: The Dark Ages, we have pushed the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti hard by running it at the game’s highest quality setting of “Ultra Nightmare” at 1440p native resolution. The average framerate is playable, but you can see that the 1% Lows, especially on the 8GB RTX 5060 Ti, are a bit too low. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is 15% faster on 1% Lows.
DLSS Upscaling
Enabling DLSS Upscaling at “Quality” makes both GeForce RTX 5060 Ti video cards playable at 1440p on Ultra Nightmware just fine, with 1% Lows above 60FPS. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is still faster, though, at 4% faster on 1% Lows.
Path Tracing with DLSS Upscaling
Though you can technically enable Path Tracing in this game on the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, you wouldn’t want to. We have enabled it and tested it purely for academic reasons, and to show what happens when you run out of VRAM capacity. Though the game isn’t playable at 1440p, Minimum Path Tracing, and DLSS Upscaling Quality on Ultra Nightmare, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is allowed to fully utilize the GPU rendering power, while the 8GB RTX 5060 Ti chokes. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is 360% faster on average and 358% faster on 1% Lows, all because it has sufficient VRAM.
4K with DLSS Upscaling
Similar to Path Tracing, when trying to run this game at 4K on Ultra Nightmare, even with DLSS Upscaling enabled on “Balanced”, VRAM becomes a huge issue. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is borderline playable, actually, it would be on “Performance” Upscaling. The 8GB RTX 5060 Ti, though, doesn’t have a chance with its VRAM capacity. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is 66% faster on average and 58% faster on 1% Lows.